in reply to pi and some continued fractions
I was most surprised to notice -- as pointed out in The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part IV) in the "Which Language Produced the Shortest codegolf Code?" section -- that the shortest Perl solution in the 1000 Digits of Pi codegolf game of 102 strokes was far behind both Ruby (54 strokes) and Python (62 strokes). This is unusual in the extreme because in the other 26 games Perl was consistently well ahead of Python, yet here was 40 strokes behind! Why? I'm afraid I don't know because I didn't play that game ... though I bet "primo" does since he holds the lowest score in all four languages. :) A wild guess is that Python has native bignums and that is crucial for this game.
The code golf forum for this game may provide some useful tips. In particular, the Rabinowitz method was recommended by "hendrik" (see for example this page) -- and hendrik solved this problem in Python in 67 strokes, just five behind the Python leading pack. Also, "hallvabo" suggested (if your solution is "close" to the 4 second time limit) submitting your solution at different times of day because the codegolf server load apparently varies considerably and your solution only need pass once to be accepted.
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