From: Jim Weirich <jweirich@...>
Date: 2003-08-21T10:23:39+09:00
Subject: Line Noise (was Punctuation as noise)

On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 13:49, Hal E. Fulton wrote:
Hal Fulton wrote:

> I cranked out a quick bit of ugly code (see
> below). Obviously it's crude -- e.g., it doesn't 
> take note of strings or comments (and it's not
> clear what it should do if it did).

I did something like this a while back when a Java programmer complained
about all that "line noise" in Ruby.  I pointed out that Java used much
more puncuation than the typical Ruby program and wrote the following
program to demonstrate...

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  ARGV.each { |fn|
    noise = open(fn) { |file| file.read }.gsub(/[A-Za-z0-9_ \t\n]/m, "")
    puts "#{fn} (#{noise.size}): #{noise}"
  }

Runnnig this over a set of programs written in different languages
gives... 

  animal.cc (83):
#<>{:()=;};:{:();};::(){::<<"\";}:{:();};::(){::<<"\";}(){*[]={,};(=;<;++)[]->();;}
  Animal.java (67):
{{();}{(){..("");}}{(){..("");}}([]){[]=[]{(),()};(=;<.;++)[].();}}
  animal.pl (41): ;{{};}{"\";};{{};}{"\";};$(->,->){$->();}
  animal.py (23): :():"":():""[(),()]:.()
  animal.rb (10): """"[.,.].

Onestepback.org is down at the moment, but I'll post the code for all
the animal programs there when it comes back online.
 
-- 
-- Jim Weirich       jweirich@one.net      http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, 
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)