python coding contest

[Simon Hengel]

Hello,
we are hosting a python coding contest an we even managed to provide a
price for the winner...

http://pycontest.net/

The contest is coincidentally held during the 22c3 and we will be
present there.

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/...coding_contest

Please send me comments, suggestions and ideas.

Have fun,

--
Simon Hengel

[André]

Neat idea!

I'm far from being a decent Python programmer but I managed (for fun)
to do it in a one-liner; however, it was definitely longer (in term of
number of characters) than the more readable multi-line solution.

André

[Tobias Bell]

André schrieb:

Neat idea! Indeed

I'm far from being a decent Python programmer but I managed (for fun)
to do it in a one-liner; however, it was definitely longer (in term of
number of characters) than the more readable multi-line solution.
I made a readable version with 352 bytes and a non-readable with 290
bytes. But it's a really ugly lambda, map, reduce kludge. Looks like Perl.

André

Tobias

[rbt]

Simon Hengel wrote:

Hello,
we are hosting a python coding contest an we even managed to provide a
price for the winner...

http://pycontest.net/

The contest is coincidentally held during the 22c3 and we will be
present there.

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/...coding_contest

Please send me comments, suggestions and ideas.

Have fun,

Does positioning matter? For example, say I give it '123' is it ok to
output this:

1
2
3

Or does it have to be 123

[Remi Villatel]

rbt wrote:

Does positioning matter? For example, say I give it '123' is it ok to
output this:

1
2
3

Or does it have to be 123

Download the test suite and you'll see that only 123 on one line passes
the test. Sorry...

--
==================
Remi Villatel
maxilys_@_tele2.fr
==================

[Bengt Richter]

On Sun, 25 Dec 2005 16:39:47 +0100, Simon Hengel <si***@airlangen.de> wrote:

Hello,
we are hosting a python coding contest an we even managed to provide a
price for the winner... ^^^^^

How much are you going to sell him or her for? ;-)

Regards,
Bengt Richter

[Claudio Grondi]

Simon Hengel wrote:

Hello,
we are hosting a python coding contest an we even managed to provide a
price for the winner...

http://pycontest.net/

The contest is coincidentally held during the 22c3 and we will be
present there.

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/...coding_contest

Please send me comments, suggestions and ideas.

Have fun,

A funny thing happened to me.

The http://www.pycontest.net/ site was down for some minutes because :

"A problem occurred in a Python script. "

it seems, that

'some clever cheat'

has crashed it.

Claudio

[Simon Hengel]

> A funny thing happened to me.

The http://www.pycontest.net/ site was down for some minutes because :

"A problem occurred in a Python script. "

it seems, that

'some clever cheat'

has crashed it.

That was me, i broke things while tweaking some stuff.

Sorry for the inconveniences,

Simon Hengel

--
python coding contest - http://www.pycontest.net/

[Marius Gedminas]

I cannot not reach the contest site at since all this morning. :-(

[Marius Gedminas]

I cannot reach the contest site at since all this morning. :-(

[Claudio Grondi]

Simon Hengel wrote:

Hello,
we are hosting a python coding contest an we even managed to provide a
price for the winner...

http://pycontest.net/

The contest is coincidentally held during the 22c3 and we will be
present there.

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/...coding_contest

Please send me comments, suggestions and ideas.

Have fun,

It seems, that the site had some trouble to stay online and especially
to provide the ranking today.

I am a bit dissapointed, that my idea of not duplicating, but utilizing
the efforts others put into solving the job (titled by the submitter ID
'TheParasite') which resulted in a submission of a 15 Bytes large full
functional module was evaluated as having a 'syntax error' problem and
was placed in the ranking at the position according to the size of the
331 byte large .zip archive it was put into along with some necessary
installation instructions.

By the way: trying to submit along with the module complete installation
instructions and comments failed because there is a 345 bytes limit for
size of allowed uploads.

Claudio

[Simon Hengel]

> It seems, that the site had some trouble to stay online and especially

to provide the ranking today.

There was a problem with our server, sorry for that.

Have fun,

Simon Hengel

[Paddy]

So, testosterone wins again!

We get to boast:
"Mine's smaller than your's"

Lets wait for Pythonic to go to bed, then sneak downstairs, go to that
tripple-X rated 'shortest solutions' website, and 'whack-off' some
solutions.
Unghhh, my solution... its coming!!!

Well don't forget to clean up before Pythonic wakes up.

Happy new year :-)

- Pad.

[Claudio Grondi]

> Please send me comments, suggestions and ideas.

Now, after the contest is over I analysed the outcome of it and have
come to the conclusion, that there were two major factors which
contributed to squeezing of code:

(1). usage of available variants for coding of the same thing
(2). sqeezing the size of used numeric and string literals

As (1) leads to less readable cryptic code it makes not much sense from
my point of view to dig deeper in that direction. As already mentioned
in this thread by Tim Peters ( pointing to
http://spoj.sphere.pl/problems/KAMIL/ ) it seems, that Pearl is here the
proper language of choice for such kind of problems anyway.

Trying to improve on (2) belongs in my eyes much more into the area of
problems discussed in comp.compression than to problems belonging into
comp.lang.python .

So what is my point? Ok, I will mention it at the end of this post.

Before that I want to thank the originators of the contest and
especially the participants for providing insight into the techniques
they have used. I have learned from the contest what lambda expression
is good for and how it works where I failed to grasp it from reading
tutorials only.

I have detected, that it would be a nice thing to have in Python a
function able to convert values from binary string to an integer
representation as in my eyes both in case of long integer values are
more or less the same thing/object. The only difference is probably in
the header not in the representation of the actual value in memory - am
I right here? Will it make sense to have a string-integer object which
value can be used in both contexts as a binary string and a long integer
value?
Is there in Python any simple way to do the same as the following two
following functions I have put together today:

def longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString(stringToConvert):
intWithBitsOfBinaryString = 0L
for singleChar in stringToConvert:
intWithBitsOfBinaryString = (intWithBitsOfBinaryString<<8) +
ord(singleChar)
#:for
return intWithBitsOfBinaryString
#:def longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString(s)

def binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(i):
listOfCharsOfStringWithThePackedInt = []
exponent = 1
while i > 256**exponent: exponent+=1
for byteNo in range(0,exponent):
noOfBitsToShift = byteNo*8

listOfCharsOfStringWithThePackedInt.append(chr(i>> noOfBitsToShift&0xFF))
#:for
# reverse (in place) in order to get the highest bits of the integer
as leftmost byte
listOfCharsOfStringWithThePackedInt.reverse()
stringWithThePackedInt = ''.join(listOfCharsOfStringWithThePackedInt)
return stringWithThePackedInt
#:def binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(i)

print "longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString('ABBA') =
%i"%longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString('ABBA')
print
"binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(longIntWithBitsOfBi naryString('ABBA')) =
'%s'"%binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(longIntWithBit sOfBinaryString('ABBA'))

which gives:

longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString('ABBA') = 1094861377
binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(longIntWithBitsOfBin aryString('ABBA')) =
'ABBA'

?

And now my point I have promised to write about:

If squeezing code makes it bad code and compressing literals is more or
less compression technique and not Python programming, it is maybe a
good idea to try to explore what Python distribution provides as data
and modules and rewrite the seven_seg module, but with following
limitations:

1. it is not allowed to use any literals in the provided code
2. it is not allowed to misuse the names of the identifiers as a kind of
literals providing data
3. it is not allowed to use modules or files which doesn't come with the
Python distribution.

I have no slightest idea if it is possible to program a seven_seg
module under such conditions. It could be a sign, that it would be a
very interesting challenge worth to get involved into or a sign I have
no slightest idea about Python and programming.

What do you all think about it?

Claudio

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 03:34:33 +0100, Claudio Grondi wrote:

Please send me comments, suggestions and ideas.
Now, after the contest is over I analysed the outcome of it and have
come to the conclusion, that there were two major factors which
contributed to squeezing of code:

(1). usage of available variants for coding of the same thing
(2). sqeezing the size of used numeric and string literals

[snip]
Is there in Python any simple way to do the same as the following two
following functions I have put together today:

They are already pretty simple. You can make them even more simple by
using less complicated names and getting rid of the explicit end block
markers. It is sometimes useful to put in explicit end block markers when
you have long blocks, but when the block is just a single line, well,
I don't see the point.

Here is another possibility.

import array
A = array.array('b')
n = 1000000
while n: .... A.append(n&255); n = n >> 8
.... A.reverse()
A array('b', [15, 66, 64]) 15*256**2 + 66*256 + 64 1000000 A.tostring() '\x0fB@'

The reverse transformation is just as easy:
A = array.array('b', "\x0fB@") # initialise from a byte string
n = 0L
for b in A: .... n = n << 8 | b
.... n

1000000L

And of course these can be turned into functions.

--
Steven.

[Claudio Grondi]

Claudio Grondi wrote:

Please send me comments, suggestions and ideas.

Now, after the contest is over I analysed the outcome of it and have
come to the conclusion, that there were two major factors which
contributed to squeezing of code:

(1). usage of available variants for coding of the same thing
(2). sqeezing the size of used numeric and string literals

As (1) leads to less readable cryptic code it makes not much sense from
my point of view to dig deeper in that direction. As already mentioned
in this thread by Tim Peters ( pointing to
http://spoj.sphere.pl/problems/KAMIL/ ) it seems, that Pearl is here the
proper language of choice for such kind of problems anyway.

Trying to improve on (2) belongs in my eyes much more into the area of
problems discussed in comp.compression than to problems belonging into
comp.lang.python .

So what is my point? Ok, I will mention it at the end of this post.

Before that I want to thank the originators of the contest and
especially the participants for providing insight into the techniques
they have used. I have learned from the contest what lambda expression
is good for and how it works where I failed to grasp it from reading
tutorials only.

I have detected, that it would be a nice thing to have in Python a
function able to convert values from binary string to an integer
representation as in my eyes both in case of long integer values are
more or less the same thing/object. The only difference is probably in
the header not in the representation of the actual value in memory - am
I right here? Will it make sense to have a string-integer object which
value can be used in both contexts as a binary string and a long integer
value?
Is there in Python any simple way to do the same as the following two
following functions I have put together today:

def longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString(stringToConvert):
intWithBitsOfBinaryString = 0L
for singleChar in stringToConvert:
intWithBitsOfBinaryString = (intWithBitsOfBinaryString<<8) +
ord(singleChar)
#:for
return intWithBitsOfBinaryString
#:def longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString(s)

def binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(i):
listOfCharsOfStringWithThePackedInt = []
exponent = 1
while i > 256**exponent: exponent+=1
for byteNo in range(0,exponent):
noOfBitsToShift = byteNo*8

listOfCharsOfStringWithThePackedInt.append(chr(i>> noOfBitsToShift&0xFF))
#:for
# reverse (in place) in order to get the highest bits of the integer
as leftmost byte
listOfCharsOfStringWithThePackedInt.reverse()
stringWithThePackedInt = ''.join(listOfCharsOfStringWithThePackedInt)
return stringWithThePackedInt
#:def binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(i)

print "longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString('ABBA') =
%i"%longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString('ABBA')
print
"binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(longIntWithBitsOfBi naryString('ABBA')) =
'%s'"%binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(longIntWithBit sOfBinaryString('ABBA'))

which gives:

longIntWithBitsOfBinaryString('ABBA') = 1094861377
binaryStringWithBitsOfLongInt(longIntWithBitsOfBin aryString('ABBA')) =
'ABBA'

?

And now my point I have promised to write about:

If squeezing code makes it bad code and compressing literals is more or
less compression technique and not Python programming, it is maybe a
good idea to try to explore what Python distribution provides as data
and modules and rewrite the seven_seg module, but with following
limitations:

1. it is not allowed to use any literals in the provided code
2. it is not allowed to misuse the names of the identifiers as a kind of
literals providing data
3. it is not allowed to use modules or files which doesn't come with the
Python distribution.

I have no slightest idea if it is possible to program a seven_seg
module under such conditions. It could be a sign, that it would be a
very interesting challenge worth to get involved into or a sign I have
no slightest idea about Python and programming.

What do you all think about it?

Claudio

After some coding trials, it turned out to be quite easy (almost
trivial) to overcome the problem of not beeing allowed to use any
literals in the script code, but I suppose, that I am not alone with not
seeing directly how to code it, so it is maybe a good exercise for a
Python beginner (like me) to cope a bit with it.
Knowing this I am curious if it is also comparable easy in other
programming languages, e.g. when using only a C/C++ compiler and linker
executables along with the provided libraries and header files? I
suppose, that each language comes with built-in literals which can be
utilized in own code to get the full range of required literals into
identifiers by using only what the language provides itself.
Am I right or not?

Claudio

[Claudio Grondi]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 03:34:33 +0100, Claudio Grondi wrote:

Please send me comments, suggestions and ideas.

Now, after the contest is over I analysed the outcome of it and have
come to the conclusion, that there were two major factors which
contributed to squeezing of code:

(1). usage of available variants for coding of the same thing
(2). sqeezing the size of used numeric and string literals

[snip]

Is there in Python any simple way to do the same as the following two
following functions I have put together today:

They are already pretty simple. You can make them even more simple by
using less complicated names and getting rid of the explicit end block
markers. It is sometimes useful to put in explicit end block markers when
you have long blocks, but when the block is just a single line, well,
I don't see the point.

Here is another possibility.

import array
A = array.array('b')
n = 1000000
while n:
.... A.append(n&255); n = n >> 8
....
A.reverse()
A
array('b', [15, 66, 64])
15*256**2 + 66*256 + 64
1000000
A.tostring()
'\x0fB@'

The reverse transformation is just as easy:

A = array.array('b', "\x0fB@") # initialise from a byte string
n = 0L
for b in A:
.... n = n << 8 | b
....
n

1000000L

And of course these can be turned into functions.

What I have thought about as a simpler/better solution is a method
allowing to avoid processing the content of the string or long integer
object by looping over its content. I suppose, that knowing enough about
Python internals it must be possible to change only the object type not
beeing forced to process the content i.e. the value itself, what in case
of big size of data to convert with methods like this above wastes CPU
time.

Claudio

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:49:58 +0100, Claudio Grondi wrote:

What I have thought about as a simpler/better solution is a method
allowing to avoid processing the content of the string or long integer
object by looping over its content.
How can you avoid looping over its content? Whether you do it yourself
using "for byte in array" or similar, or Python does it for you
(using array.tostring perhaps), *something* has to walk through the bytes.

If you don't like walking the string, write a function to do it once, and
then use the function.
I suppose, that knowing enough about
Python internals it must be possible to change only the object type not
beeing forced to process the content i.e. the value itself, what in case
of big size of data to convert with methods like this above wastes CPU
time.

I'm reminded of a time I was going for a drive in the country when I drove
past an apple orchid. Standing in the orchid was a farmer with a pig. He
lifted the pig into the air, and the pig then bit an apple and slowly
chewed it. The farmer then carried him over to another branch, and the pig
ate another apple.

I was so surprised I stopped my car and wandered over to ask the farmer
what he was doing.

"I'm feeding apples to my pig," he replied.

"Wouldn't it save time to just pick some apples and feed them to the pig?"

The farmer looked at me like I was an idiot. "What's time to a pig?"
The moral of the story is, before spending time working on some scheme to
save CPU time, you better be absolutely sure that firstly, you are going
to save CPU time, secondly, that it is enough CPU time to be worth saving,
and thirdly, that you aren't wasting more of your own time to do it.

--
Steven.

[Claudio Grondi]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:49:58 +0100, Claudio Grondi wrote:

What I have thought about as a simpler/better solution is a method
allowing to avoid processing the content of the string or long integer
object by looping over its content.

How can you avoid looping over its content? Whether you do it yourself
using "for byte in array" or similar, or Python does it for you
(using array.tostring perhaps), *something* has to walk through the bytes.

If you don't like walking the string, write a function to do it once, and
then use the function.

I suppose, that knowing enough about
Python internals it must be possible to change only the object type not
beeing forced to process the content i.e. the value itself, what in case
of big size of data to convert with methods like this above wastes CPU
time.

I'm reminded of a time I was going for a drive in the country when I drove
past an apple orchid. Standing in the orchid was a farmer with a pig. He
lifted the pig into the air, and the pig then bit an apple and slowly
chewed it. The farmer then carried him over to another branch, and the pig
ate another apple.

I was so surprised I stopped my car and wandered over to ask the farmer
what he was doing.

"I'm feeding apples to my pig," he replied.

"Wouldn't it save time to just pick some apples and feed them to the pig?"

The farmer looked at me like I was an idiot. "What's time to a pig?"
The moral of the story is, before spending time working on some scheme to
save CPU time, you better be absolutely sure that firstly, you are going
to save CPU time, secondly, that it is enough CPU time to be worth saving,
and thirdly, that you aren't wasting more of your own time to do it.

It's a funny story :-))

, but in my eyes not appropriate in given context, because my prior goal
is to understand some more about Python internals, i.e. what is and if
it is at all a differerence between the internal representation of a
string and a long integer.

I know, I should probably look into the C source of Python, but I
suppose it could be too hard for me to find the appropriate piece of
code, so I welcome any hints.

If I knew the internal representation of string and long integer objects
and were able to read/write to memory and point an identifier at a given
memory address, a conversion between long integer and string types were
probably nothing else as changing some bytes and repointing an
identifier (assuming that string and long integer values are in memory
the same data if they represent the same value). That it would save CPU
time is secondary here, but with increasing costs of energy making the
number on my electrical power bill higher each year due to higher power
consumption with increasing number of programs I run (it makes a
difference of 50 Watt between an algorithm keeping the CPU 100% busy and
an algorithm using only 1% of it) it is not necessarily paranoia driving
one to consider potential savings of CPU time.
In this context the example of the bigdec class comes to my mind, where
usage of another algorithm made it possible to cut down power
consumption and time of printing a decimal form of the largest known
prime number from 7 hours of a 100% busy CPU down to 7 seconds!

Claudio

[bonono]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

I'm reminded of a time I was going for a drive in the country when I drove
past an apple orchid. Standing in the orchid was a farmer with a pig. He
lifted the pig into the air, and the pig then bit an apple and slowly
chewed it. The farmer then carried him over to another branch, and the pig
ate another apple.

I was so surprised I stopped my car and wandered over to ask the farmer
what he was doing.

"I'm feeding apples to my pig," he replied.

"Wouldn't it save time to just pick some apples and feed them to the pig?"

The farmer looked at me like I was an idiot. "What's time to a pig?"

Has anyone studied if farmers like him are in general healthier ?

[Peter Hansen]

bo****@gmail.com wrote:

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

I'm reminded of a time I was going for a drive in the country when I drove
past an apple orchid. Standing in the orchid was a farmer with a pig. He
lifted the pig into the air, and the pig then bit an apple and slowly
chewed it. The farmer then carried him over to another branch, and the pig
ate another apple.

I was so surprised I stopped my car and wandered over to ask the farmer
what he was doing.

"I'm feeding apples to my pig," he replied.

"Wouldn't it save time to just pick some apples and feed them to the pig?"

The farmer looked at me like I was an idiot. "What's time to a pig?"

Has anyone studied if farmers like him are in general healthier ?

Yes, they have stronger arms, but some greater incidence of back
problems as well. Other than that they're basically just as healthy as
the rest of us who feed our pigs the normal way.

-Peter

[Claudio Grondi]

Claudio Grondi wrote:

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:49:58 +0100, Claudio Grondi wrote:

What I have thought about as a simpler/better solution is a method
allowing to avoid processing the content of the string or long
integer object by looping over its content.

How can you avoid looping over its content? Whether you do it yourself
using "for byte in array" or similar, or Python does it for you
(using array.tostring perhaps), *something* has to walk through the
bytes.

If you don't like walking the string, write a function to do it once, and
then use the function.

I suppose, that knowing enough about Python internals it must be
possible to change only the object type not beeing forced to process
the content i.e. the value itself, what in case of big size of data
to convert with methods like this above wastes CPU time.

I'm reminded of a time I was going for a drive in the country when I
drove
past an apple orchid. Standing in the orchid was a farmer with a pig. He
lifted the pig into the air, and the pig then bit an apple and slowly
chewed it. The farmer then carried him over to another branch, and the
pig
ate another apple.

I was so surprised I stopped my car and wandered over to ask the farmer
what he was doing.

"I'm feeding apples to my pig," he replied.

"Wouldn't it save time to just pick some apples and feed them to the
pig?"

The farmer looked at me like I was an idiot. "What's time to a pig?"
The moral of the story is, before spending time working on some scheme to
save CPU time, you better be absolutely sure that firstly, you are going
to save CPU time, secondly, that it is enough CPU time to be worth
saving,
and thirdly, that you aren't wasting more of your own time to do it.

It's a funny story :-))

, but in my eyes not appropriate in given context, because my prior goal
is to understand some more about Python internals, i.e. what is and if
it is at all a differerence between the internal representation of a
string and a long integer.

I know, I should probably look into the C source of Python, but I
suppose it could be too hard for me to find the appropriate piece of
code, so I welcome any hints.

If I knew the internal representation of string and long integer objects
and were able to read/write to memory and point an identifier at a given
memory address, a conversion between long integer and string types were
probably nothing else as changing some bytes and repointing an
identifier (assuming that string and long integer values are in memory
the same data if they represent the same value). That it would save CPU
time is secondary here, but with increasing costs of energy making the
number on my electrical power bill higher each year due to higher power
consumption with increasing number of programs I run (it makes a
difference of 50 Watt between an algorithm keeping the CPU 100% busy and
an algorithm using only 1% of it) it is not necessarily paranoia driving
one to consider potential savings of CPU time.
In this context the example of the bigdec class comes to my mind, where
usage of another algorithm made it possible to cut down power
consumption and time of printing a decimal form of the largest known
prime number from 7 hours of a 100% busy CPU down to 7 seconds!

Claudio

From stringobject.h :
typedef struct {
PyObject_VAR_HEAD
long ob_shash;
int ob_sstate;
char ob_sval[1];
/* Invariants:
* ob_sval contains space for 'ob_size+1' elements.
* ob_sval[ob_size] == 0.
* ob_shash is the hash of the string or -1 if not computed yet.
* ob_sstate != 0 iff the string object is in stringobject.c's
* 'interned' dictionary; in this case the two references
* from 'interned' to this object are *not counted* in ob_refcnt.
*/
} PyStringObject;

From longobject.h :
typedef struct _longobject PyLongObject; /* Revealed in longintrepr.h */
From longintrepr.h :
typedef unsigned short digit;
struct _longobject {
PyObject_VAR_HEAD
digit ob_digit[1];
};

From this I mean to see, that the string data header is longer
containing an additional long and an int compared to long integer data
header. The long integer seem to be an array of unsigned short values
and the string an array of characters. My MSDN help tells me, that:
"Type short int (or simply short) is an integral type that is larger
than or equal to the size of type char, and shorter than or equal to the
size of type int." In Microsoft Visual C++ short is 2 bytes long, and
because I am on an Intel processor the sequence of bytes will differ
from what I will get when creating a binary string out of a long integer
due to swapping of byte order. Am I right here?

My conclusion is, that beeing on e.g. Motorola 68000 based processors
the actual data behind the string and the long integer types will be the
same, but beeing on an Intel 386 series processor based systems the
actual data stored in memory behind a string and long integer will differ.

So finally the idea of converting binary strings forth and back to long
integers without looping over the data content does for sure not work on
Intel processor based systems, but may work on processors which don't
need swapped bytes for integer operations ( I found this page
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kazad/r.../cs/endian.htm gives a good
overview about the problems with byte swapping, is there any better
reference related to this subject online? ).

As Python tries to be multiplatform, I don't understand why it stores
long integers as an array of shorts and not as an array of chars?
Historical reasons? Speed reasons? Any other reasons?

Wouldn't it be more intuitive to have in Python a data type beeing an
object with binary data which can be easily 'casted' to both string and
long integer depending how it should be processed or used?
Do you see any advantage to have such data type, or am I quite alone
with this idea?

Claudio

[Michael Spencer]

Claudio Grondi wrote:

...I analysed the outcome of it and have
come to the conclusion, that there were two major factors which
contributed to squeezing of code:

(1). usage of available variants for coding of the same thing
(2). sqeezing the size of used numeric and string literals

....not only squeezing the size of the literals, but the combined size of the
compressed data and the code to expand it. In this respect it turned out to be
a surprisingly rewarding challenge, and a nice reinforcement of the Pythonic
mantra of seeking performance gains by optimizing algorithms.

Michael

[Claudio Grondi]

Michael Spencer wrote:

Claudio Grondi wrote:

...I analysed the outcome of it and have
come to the conclusion, that there were two major factors which
contributed to squeezing of code:

(1). usage of available variants for coding of the same thing
(2). sqeezing the size of used numeric and string literals

....not only squeezing the size of the literals, but the combined size
of the compressed data and the code to expand it. In this respect it
turned out to be a surprisingly rewarding challenge, and a nice
reinforcement of the Pythonic mantra of seeking performance gains by
optimizing algorithms.

Michael

You are right. I have overseen that aspect which makes the contest a
kind of Python scripting language related compression challenge.

I haven't done it yet, but I consider it interesting to check out how
compression algorithms are doing on the three lines 7 segment LCD
mimicking text representations of a decimal number generated by
seven_seg() compared to size of input string plus the size of the
module. I suppose, as the input string is not of minimal possible size
compared to the information it carries, compression schemes should be
able to beat the 'compression' by seven_seg().

Interesting in this context for me is also, that if I understand it
right, according to Kolmogorov complexity law, it will be never possible
to state if the achieved solution is the shortest possible as it will be
also not possible for any other provided (shorter) solution.

Claudio