python coding contest

[Christian Tismer]

Tim Hochberg wrote:
> Christian Tismer wrote:

...

>> - Squeezing many lines into one using semicola does not help,
>>    the program will be expanded to use one statement per line
>>
>> - blank lines are allowed and not counted if they are not
>>    needed as part of the code
> 
> These two would be easy to acomplish using something like:
> 
> def countchars(text):
>      n = 0
>      for line in text.split('\n'):
> 	n += len(line.strip())
>      return n
> 
> This would ignore leading and trailing white space as well as blank lines.
> 
> Also makes
> 
>      a=5; b=10
> 
> measure as one character longer than
> 
>      a = 5
>      b = 10
> 
> which can only be good.

Good point!

>> - the length of names does not count, unless the code depends on it.
> 
> Probably too hard.

I don't want to reward people for using ultra-short, unreadable
variable names, but also not to enable them to code algorithms
by them :-)
My idea was to rename all variables by a simple transformation
of the code objects, with the side rule that the program still works.
This can be automated rather easily.

> I thought the metric was characters, not lines. At least that's what the 
> 'about' page says. You still get hit by leading whitespace on multiple 
> line programs though.

So why not simply count length of code objects? :-)
Plus count every changeable name as one, others by length.
Same for constants, so we don't get tricked by encoding
the whole program by a tuple engine :-)

ciao - chris

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