Yesterday I discovered a funny challenge on a board I visit regularly. The challenge was to create the shortest possible program to get a given output. In my case, it was the “99 bottles of beer” song. Here is my solution:
$b=" on the wall.";for(reverse 1..99) {$i=$_>1?" bottles of beer":" bottle of beer"; print"$_$i$b $_$i.\n";print"Take one down and pass it around, ",$_-1,"$i$b\n\n"if$_>1;} print"Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer$b\n";
236 characters (you can delete the newlines. I just put them in to make it more readable). So far I couldn’t get it any shorter. Maybe someone else could give it a try. 
Ok, just did a short update. Now it has 235 characters:
$b=" on the wall.";for(reverse 1..99){print$_,$i=$_>1? " bottles of beer":" bottle of beer", "$b $_$i.\n";print"Take one down and pass it around, ", $_-1,"$i$b\n\n"if$_>1;} print"Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer$b\n";
FINAL UPDATE:
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I just discovered a small singular/plural problem with the code above, so I had to redesign it a little … This is now the final (and working) code:
$i=" bottles of beer";$b=" on the wall";for(reverse 1..99) {$j=$i if$_>1;print"$_$j$b, $_$j.\n";$j=~s/es/e/ if$_==2; print"Take one down and pass it around, ",$_-1,"$j$b.\n \n"if$_>1;} print"Go to the store and buy some more, 99$i$b.\n";
234 characters …
4 Comments
lol, silly,but great =]
i did it with 71 characters
here’s my python script:
import urllib
print urllib.urlopen(”http://tinyurl.com/5qlwux”).read()
lol =] but it works : )
I know, some people did that, but it’s not allowed in the rules.
!
You have to write everything yourself. Give it a try
yep, including anything is not allowed.