[LRUG] Fwd: Chat Digest, Vol 64, Issue 5

[Andrew McDonough]

Ok, so here's an idea, there were four medals left, and I'm
automatically awarding one to Paul Battley for his crazy whitespace
hack.  That leaves three up for grabs to be awarded at June's LRUG.
Rather than everyone hacking away at Paul's solution, trying to write
more concise whitespace-decoding code, lets say that there are three
separate problems left to solve:

Problem 1. As James Adam suggested on twitter, we see who can get
their solution down to the fewest characters when whitespace IS
counted*
Problem 2. Don't count whitespace, but disallow using it to encode
executable code. This should result in a readable solution but also
demonstrate metaprogramming tricks (and is probably the closest thing
to what people were working towards already).
Problem 3. The solution that solves the problems in a way that is most
readable to a programmer, i.e. good style, comments where appropriate
(as the methods still need to be called hole1,hole2, etc).

Problems 1 and 2 are easy to measure, but problem 3 is obviously
subjective.  It should be the sort of code you'd write if you were
asked to solve the problem as part of your job.

Let's say that people who want this solutions considered post the URL
of their fork to the list by midday on 1st June (and say which problem
you are attempting to solve).  We can collectively judge the winner of
problem 3.

Andrew

* To configure the build to count whitespace, change the
COUNT_WHITESPACE constant in the Rakefile

COUNT_WHITESPACE = true

---
Andrew McDonough
CTO, Tribesports
http://tribesports.com