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←ιN
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.