One-liner wars

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The Jargon File Parts of this article are based on the Jargon File, v. 4.4.7, a public domain document of hacker jargon.

one-liner wars

Usage: n. See Also: write-only language, line noise

one-liner wars: n.

A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see write-only language and line noise). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine in one line of operators chosen from APL's exceedingly hairy primitive set. A similar amusement was practiced among TECO hackers and is now popular among Perl aficionados.

Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this:

(2=0+.=T{}.|T)/T<-iN

Here's a Perl program that prints primes:

perl -wle '(1 x $_) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/ && print while ++ $_'

In the Perl world this game is sometimes called Perl Golf because the player with the fewest (key)strokes wins.

Sources

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