Re: a golden oldie challenge: Eliza

On Feb 24, 9:00 am, Dimitre Liotev <no...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Mark Tarver <dr.mtar...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> > Sorry I missed a couple of later attempts
>
> > Lisp                       150 LOC  ................ Peter Norvig
> > Qi (slightly revised)  63 LOC   .................Mark Tarver
> > Ruby                      53 LOC   .................William James
> > Q                           10 LOC   ..................Steven Apter
> > K                             3 LOC  ...................Steven Apter
> > Ruby (again)            17 LOC ...................William James
> > Mathematica            20 LOC .................. Szabolcs
>
> > Mark
>
> So K wins the competition in brevity,

I'm not so sure.  The three lines of K were not a
complete program.  I just posted a 4-line Ruby program
that does everything the Q program does.

>      but does the ability to squeeze
> code into illegible character blobs say anything about the suitability
> of a programming language for writing readable and understandable
> programs? I'd rather follow the principle that "Programs must be written
> for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."...

If you really believe that, then you must agree that the
language used in your signature was designed to be easy
for a computer, not a human, to parse.

>
> --
> Dimitre Liotev
> (format t "~{~a~}" (reverse '("et" "n" "in." "a" "zn" "@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" "l" "d")))

Ruby:

%w(et n in. a zn @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 l d).reverse.join

Now that's easier for a human to read!  Of course, Lisp makes
it easy to have macros that generate code, which is a powerful
feature.