Should the "#lang racket" line be included in code golfs?

Question

There has been discussion whether the #lang racket line should be included in code golf submissions.

So really the question is two-fold:

• The technical aspect: Is it possible to run Racket code without the #lang racket line?
• Poll: If it isn't possible to run Racket code without the #lang racket line, should this it be necessary in code golf submissions?

Edit

It turns out one can use #!racket instead of #lang racket as a shorter alternate form.

Edit 2

It turns out you do not strictly need the #lang racket when you do this: racket -e "$(< your-racket-file.rkt)" or possibly more likely racket -e "$(pbpaste)" or similar.

Edit 3

Even simpler -- racket -f your-racket-file.rkt works without #lang racket.

Answer 1

No.

It's like a shebang, there's no need to count it. I see no reason to include a line that's meant for the shell/compiler. Its not like its real code, it doesn't add to your answer in any way.

Nobody counts shebangs in Bash scripts, since you don't need them to run, so why do that with Racket?

#!/usr/bin/env bash
rm -rf /

Now how many characters is this code? I'd say 8, because that's how long rm is. The shebang doesn't do anything to the code except tell the shell what language the code is. It's like a file extension, but in the file. Are we going to add five bytes for adding .java?

We can easily remove the shebang by using sh or by adding the file extension .sh, meaning we get:

rm -rf /

Wow... now it's only 8 bytes... wylat...

Now let's do that with Racket.

#lang racket
"Hello, World!"

#lang racket specifies the language. It is not needed to run Racket programs in files:

$ cat hello.racket
"Hello, World!"
$ racket -f hello.racket
Hello, World!

There's no need for it, so there's no need to count it.

Answer 2

Yes.

Count the #lang racket in the character count.