On Sat, 8 Jun 2002, Ton Hospel wrote:

> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>       Stefan `Sec` Zehl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > 
> > I did spend waay to much time tring to get formline() or format to
> > produce somthing which would help me, but I now rest assured that there
> > is a reason why I never met this before. :)
> 
> all these "write" related words are so loooooong. I don't think this one
> will get used in golf unless the challenge is extremely "formish".
> 

I tried this too. One problem I had is that "..." is special in a format.

> > 
> > I was happy about two parts of my program:
> > 
> > "$_=join$"x3,@F;s/(...) +/$1 /g;" (to generate the well formed text line)
> > Where even Stephen Turner only had
> > "$_=sprintf'%-3s 'x@F,@F;s/ +$//;" in his winning solution
> 

What's this "even Stephen Turner" supposed to mean? I'm no alien!

> Nice, but words as long as "sprintf" and "join"  make me go "mmmm".
> 

I felt freer to use things like sprintf in this longer puzzle. Besides, I'd
have had to save eight strokes to move up one place!

> > I also had much fun with the idea using pack/unpack"U*" (i.e. uudecode)
> > as a compressor, and only one other with that Idea was Marko Nippula.
> 
> Well, at least only Marko posted. In fact both Rick Klement and me also
> played with the pack based decompressor, but it seems we both decided to
> not submit it (aliens needing some kind of secret edge ?).
> There's probably others who tried.
> 

I tried a variant: packing the seven-bit characters into 8-bit characters.
But you only save 25 on a 200-stroke solution that way, and the overhead is
greater than that.

-- 
Stephen Turner, Cambridge, UK    http://homepage.ntlworld.com/adelie/stephen/
"This is Henman's 8th Wimbledon, and he's only lost 7 matches." BBC, 2/Jul/01

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