Author: Scott Gasch
Date: 12:21:30 02/23/05
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I hate to ramble about this topic but we are not doing gymnastics at the olympics where we need judges. There are pretty clear emperical ways to define a good program: it should do the job, be fast and be small. Readability, clarity, reusability, approach... these things are nice when you are writing code at work or hacking on your chess engine. But the question here was "solve this problem" not "solve this problem using method x (and by the way make nice readable, reusable code)". If you agree about the goals of a good program then how to measure is simple: 1. We can verify that it does the job easily enough -- compile it and run it 2. We can emperically measure size by compiling all entrants with the same compiler and settings and comparing the amount of code generated. Counting lines of C or characters in a file is ridiculous. 3. Because small is not always fast, the last phase is to time the execution of each entrant. The balance between 2. and 3. is debatable but I don't know why we talk about reusable code or debate people's algorithm choice. (of course this assumes people are coding in the same language... I don't know how to pick in a pool of submissions where some people used C and others used Perl... other than to say I _truly_ appreciate a clever Perl script (and could not, personally, think of one to solve the problem) but Perl loses on metrics 2. and 3.) Scott
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