Over at http://spoj.sphere.pl/problems/SIZECON/
the task is to come up with the shortest program that solves a different problem. There's a twist in this one: Score equals to size of source code of your program except symbols with ASCII code <= 32. So blanks, newlines and tabs aren't counted at all. However, no "control characters" of any kind are counted, and I found a convoluted way to transform any Perl program so that only 7 "readable" characters remain. That's currently the shortest solution known (given the stated metric -- my Perl source is actually over 400 bytes! all but 7 of them have ord < 33, though). There's probably still room for improvement in the "shortest" Python program known for this task. No deadlines, no prizes, and you don't get to see anyone else's code, but as a form of programming masturbation it's great ;-) http://spoj.sphere.pl/problems/KAMIL/ is another program-size task, but this one counts all bytes. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list