My point with mentioning "tightly packed" was that if you'd tried to make the C version small, you'd come out with something much tinier than the 1047 bytes I mentioned.
I see he's set himself a very different goal, which is fine but not that interesting to those of us that aren't Python programmers, I guess.
What disappointed me was clicking through from a headline that seemed to indicate it'd be a tiny implementation, when it's in fact rather bloated.
You are not entirely right. In python, one line means something as it is only one statement (as mentioned above). Author is also strict about not using eval -- with eval you could snuck multiple lines into one line (using \n in the evaluated string).
I'm not sure you can write function definitions, (nested) loops and other things that rely on indentation in single line using semicolons. At least I never managed to do that.
I reckon that the challenge involved in reducing the problem to one line (as in one single Python statement) has little to do with how many characters long it is.
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The goal wasn't "tightly packed" the goal was "one line."
In Python that means, essentially, one expression. That's what makes it a stunt.
My point with mentioning "tightly packed" was that if you'd tried to make the C version small, you'd come out with something much tinier than the 1047 bytes I mentioned.
I see he's set himself a very different goal, which is fine but not that interesting to those of us that aren't Python programmers, I guess.
What disappointed me was clicking through from a headline that seemed to indicate it'd be a tiny implementation, when it's in fact rather bloated.
In this case "one line" doesn't mean much. You could have a 1mb file in one line. Nowadays a "line" is between 80-140 characters.
You are not entirely right. In python, one line means something as it is only one statement (as mentioned above). Author is also strict about not using eval -- with eval you could snuck multiple lines into one line (using \n in the evaluated string).
Last time when I used python I could separate statements with a semicolon and put as many as i want in a line. Did that change ? ;-)
This did not change, but the author also didn't use semicolons. As stated many times above, this is a single Python expression.
I'm not sure you can write function definitions, (nested) loops and other things that rely on indentation in single line using semicolons. At least I never managed to do that.
You can do it with lambdas, but it's going to be absurdly ugly: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2008/09/on-writing-python-one-liners....
I reckon that the challenge involved in reducing the problem to one line (as in one single Python statement) has little to do with how many characters long it is.