«

On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 13:49, Hal E. Fulton wrote:
Hal Fulton wrote:

> I cranked out a quick bit of ugly code (see
> below). Obviously it's crude -- e.g., it doesn't
> take note of strings or comments (and it's not
> clear what it should do if it did).

I did something like this a while back when a Java programmer complained
about all that "line noise" in Ruby. I pointed out that Java used much
more puncuation than the typical Ruby program and wrote the following
program to demonstrate...

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
ARGV.each { |fn|
noise = open(fn) { |file| file.read }.gsub(/[A-Za-z0-9_ \t\n]/m, "")
puts "#{fn} (#{noise.size}): #{noise}"
}

Runnnig this over a set of programs written in different languages
gives...

animal.cc (83):
#<>{)=;};:{);};:){::<<"\";}:{);};:){::<< "\";}(){*[]={,};(=;<;++)[]->();;}
Animal.java (67):
{{();}{(){..("");}}{(){..("");}}([]){[]=[]{(),()};(=;<.;++)[].();}}
animal.pl (41): ;{{};}{"\";};{{};}{"\";};$(->,->){$->();}
animal.py (23): ):""):""[(),()]:.()
animal.rb (10): """"[.,.].

Onestepback.org is down at the moment, but I'll post the code for all
the animal programs there when it comes back online.

--
-- Jim Weirich http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)