I just noticed that another form for the golf entries looks like:

verb&.stdin''

So that's a bit nicer, in my opinion.

-- 
Raul

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:00 AM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> golf.shinh.org is a code golf site, and supports J. And I think we
> even sometimes put entries there.
>
> But getting J to work seems a bit inscrutable.
>
> As near as I can tell, from inspecting the entries.
>
> (1) wd means something like echo in the version of J used  there? I
> guess that saves two characters, but...
>
> (2) J gets executed in a manner analogous to this:
>
> HOME=/tmp <inputfile ~/j602/bin/jconsole programfile
>
> So that means that the code tends to wind up looking something like
> this (for numeric problems):
>
> wd;:inv(8!:0)EXPRESSION GOES HERE".;._2(1!:1)3
>
> Exit seems to be implicit because J will exit on end-of-file.
>
> And 1!:1]3 gives the entire input file (including newline characters).
>
> So that's a penalty of ~26 characters for numeric problems. Maybe a
> bit less for character based problems?
>
> ....
>
> Also:
>
> The code of a submission is not visible until a competition is over,
> so "Endless" problems remain permanently hidden. You can only see code
> in post mortems. Also, there's no index on the page, and the pages are
> rather huge. To fine J entries you wind up searching for something
> like "J _" (interactive search: letter J, space, underline).
>
> ....
>
> Seems like we ought to be able to do better.
>
> I guess the thing to do would be to accumulate a test database of the
> existing entries, build up a j803 version which supports them, and
> then implement some support for i/o that's a bit more concise and
> supports those kinds of problems?
>
> Code golf by itself isn't all that useful of an exercise by itself,
> but concise i/o would in fact be generically useful. So even if the
> golf site never got upgraded, this might be a useful project?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Raul
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