[Chicago] Can you write Perl in Python?

[Martin Maney]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 12:58:41AM -0600, Edward S. Marshall wrote:
> (and it actually shortened the code, too). I can easily see how you
> could get the representation for a digit down to a single byte, but the
> mental version of the code needed to extract it seems much longer than
> what I have now.

Yeah, that's the tricky part.  Of course there are a number of
intermediate encodings possible as well, and in the end I suppose you
just have to try them all and see which strikes the best balance
between bytes spent on literals and bytes spent truning them into the
required output.

BTW, following Ian's suggestion to use lamda rather than the more
customary function form does end up saving a few more characters.  134,
and this time for sure that's as good as that encoding can get.  :-/

> Madness, all of this. ;-) And yet, I can't wait to see what the 120
> character version looks like...

I think Ian may have discovered it, although his overnight exclamtion
on #chipy wasn't unambiguous (and I had gone to bed, so I wasn't there
to ask for clarification).

still resisiting'ly yours, but probably not for much longer'ly...

-- 
Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity
of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity
of the loser is perfectly clear.  It is the nation's confidence
in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law.
 - Justice John Paul Stevens, from his dissenting opinion Dec 12, 2000