I suppose considering your later posts that this a waste of time, but i felt the urge to make the following comment about something you said:

"hackers - heroes of the computer revolution" in that any code you can write, i will write in less lines. (not a challenge, just philosophy) "bumming" out instructions is the foundation of computer programming and continues to drive me as a programmer.

I have read Steven Levys book too, several times actually, it was inspiration for me in my younger years and I gave it to all of my colleagues as a Christmas present last year. From reading it I know that bumming instructions was a pastime performed by programmers using unbelievably small memory spaces (probably less ram than is in a digital wrist watch these days) on CPU's with minimal instruction sets at the very dawn of the computer era. (Consider that Knuths MIX is supposed to be representative of computer from two or three generations after the TX0 and code bumming, and it _only_ has 4000 words of ram.)

but i ask you to not insinuate my "more functionality with less keystrokes" method is wrong.

Yes thats _exactly_ what im saying. Bumming ops has nothing to do with the modern era where we have virtually unlimited ram (in comparison anyway) and rarely (if ever) write in assembly. (Embedded systems may be the exception, but my guess is that you arent doing that)It has even less to do with the use of languages like perl. In perl there are many many things that can be reduced into a minimal form, great for the programmer, horrible for efficiency. A simple example is the following:

my ($x,$y)=(1,2);
#one line, SLOW
($x,$y)=($y,$x); 
#three lines. fast.
my $tmp=$x;
$x=$y;
$y=$tmp;
[download]

On this level I recall Knuths explaination for why all of his code is presented in MIX, not some high level language (I paraphrase, when I get home ill get the proper quote and add it to the bottom of this post)

Programmers are inclined by lazyness to write code as efficiently as possible, for them. This means that in a high level language they tend to use the constructs and mechanisms of the language in a way that reduces the required keystrokes. Unfortunately these construct rarely produce optimal code.

There are lots of posts about optimisation, I've even been burned by the subject a couple of times (an example is here and Tilly provided me with an excellent link on the subject: Code Tuning you will note that I was set straight in a variety of ways) but I assure you that in most languages, and especially perl the smallest program is almost definately _not_ the most efficient. Which means that your 'bumming' game is a plain and simple waste of time, and not only that it'll probably produce sub optimal results. Note that the computer pioneers (Greenblat and co) probably didnt care about this as their primary aim was to get the maximum amount of functionality out of the smallest memory space.

Oh, regarding your pecular formatting, I read one of your other posts where you say you defy convention as a matter of course. Thats cool. Lots of people do it. In fact odds are many of the people here by virtue of being hackers do as well. But they also understand that there are times, such as communicating with each other, when conventions are not foolish social constructions but rather the result of years and years of figuring out how to do something as efficiently and as error free as possible. Your habit of all lower case with no paragraph structure is difficult to read and therefore unlikely to be taken seriously. Assuming you are from an english speaking nation, I wonder if in your urge to defy convention you communicate only in pig latin? Or perhaps in Navaho?

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)