Yah. You've got a point. The best way to judge such a thing may be to have an "impartial" judge decide which one they like best.

Personaly, I like the idea of the various scored programing contests. Your bottles-of-beer question is simply a bad question. A better one would have read: write a function, bottles_of_beer, which takes a single parameter, the number of bottles to start with. It should return a string of the form "$n bottles of beer on the wall, $n bottles of beer. You take one down, you pass it around...\n$n-1 bottles of beer on the wall"..., where $n is the number passed in. It should end with the line "ENOBEER", after you've passed around the last beer.

"Winners" will be programs that do it in the fewest number of characters (as mesured by ls -l, on a one-character-newline system), the fewest opcodes (as mesured by B::Concise), and the shortest running time (on my system).

(In fact, can anybody find issue with this form of rules? I might write up a Tutorial on golf contests... even though I don't purticularly like writing it. (I might like doing perl racing, or minimal-opcode-programing (NEED BETTER NAME!), though.) Hm. Two more scoring methods just crossed my mind: B::Size (more then number of opcodes, since it also includes info on constants), and the size of the output of B::Assemble (more then B::Size, less then B::Size? Different in any way the B::Size? I don't know)

Anyway, I find the topic very intersting, and am probably going to ponder mroe on it. But now, I'm going to bed.