It's accepted practice to include non-standard compiler or interpreter flags in a program's byte count (most often used with Perl and Ruby, to run the program in an implicit I/O loop - but there are other use cases). However, I can't find any information about how exactly we count these, and if there is no definitive reference for this on meta, it's not exactly an objective scoring.
Several questions come to mind:
- Most flags require a leading
-
or--
. Should these be included in the count? - Should spaces between multiple arguments be included in the count?
- If we don't count the spaces, then consider that often
-option=5
is equivalent to-option 5
. In such a case, should the=
be counted?
What are our rules (or should our rules be) for counting command-line arguments given to compilers and interpreters?