RE: (Perl_Golf_Section++)

[Russ]

in reply to Perl Golf - A proposal for a new section of PerlMonks.org

Yes! I would love to see a Golf section on PM.

Further proposal: to differentiate the Perl Golf section from the Obfuscated Perl section, we should encourage readability through whitespace. "Score" entries by the number of non-whitespace characters only.

/me would participate... :-)

Russ
Brainbench 'Most Valuable Professional' for Perl

[Adam]

Careful... whitespace is a character too. Think about regexs, strings, subroutines and other places where white space is important. \S are definately chars and should be counted.

[Russ]

Ah. You're right. I am, of course, thinking about readability whitespace, not programmatic whitespace...

This does make it much harder to easily quantify a score for a piece of code. I am mainly trying to prevent Perl Golf from simply becoming another Obfuscated area. Since so much "obfuscated" code is simply normal Perl constructs with one-letter variable names and no whitespace, I'd like to see the Perl Golf section emphasize clever, terse, and readable code, since we already have a section devoted to unreadability.

Russ
Brainbench 'Most Valuable Professional' for Perl

[johannz]

I would prefer it if we encouraged posters of perl golf entries to explain their code. For example, the snippet I posted took me about 15~20 minutes to figure out all the details. I am trying to convince the gentleman who showed it to me to comment the node he entered to explain how the map and translation operator interact. This way it could be a learning experience in addition to gaining bragging rights :-)