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Here's have an idea, which may save millions of bytes to golfers out there. But I'm not sure it's good.

  1. Take a language that's good for Golfing (e.g. Pyth).
  2. Take all existing CodeGolf answers in this language, and build a character frequency table.
  3. Build a Huffman tree based on this table.
  4. Create a new language, which is basically the same, except that the interpreter starts by Huffman-decoding the program, using this fixed tree.

Issues:

  1. Does it have a real saving potential? Intuitively I'd say that for 10 char programs it should save a byte or two.
  2. Is it nice to create a language that's 99% based on an existing language?
  3. Should we use 7-bit only?
  4. How will it affect the site? Won't answers in the new language be (even less) interesting than answers in the one it's based on?

Anyway, I'm too lazy to actually implement it. So if anyone wants to, feel free.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ What would you call it? Pyt? Sounds too close to Piet. :-) \$\endgroup\$
    – Level River St
    Oct 23, 2015 at 18:15
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    \$\begingroup\$ @steveverrill, Py. If you Huffman-encode the name Pyth with a custom table, you need 9 bits. So it should be 2 bytes. \$\endgroup\$
    – ugoren
    Oct 25, 2015 at 7:46

3 Answers 3

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You can do it if you want, but don't expect it to be well received as a golfing language. The language would be valid, but uninteresting, and won't be usually compared with the original language just like nobody would compare Python and Pyth.

But as long as it is valid, I think someone have to do it at least once in the history, to see how uninteresting it exactly is. And that may inspire other useful ideas.

There are many golfy esolangs that are rarely used by golfers. It's not bad to just invent a new one, just like the first person who wanted to invent a golfing languages when all other existing languages are used for serious programming. (Or maybe you want to invent a codepage instead, to allow better presentation.)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I've made a golfed version of Java. Check it out if interested: github.com/magicgoose/gj It doesn't use any cool compression techniques, though. And it's theoretically editable by hand, if there's an editor which can work with 6-bit numbers, not 8 as usual hex editors. I think I'll try to do some challenges with it sooner or later. \$\endgroup\$
    – Display Name
    Sep 12, 2016 at 17:01
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The general rule is that what we count is the length of the source code, where that is understood as the file/string which the programmer edits. Your proposed language would really be an intermediate bytecode which no-one would ever edit directly, and so it would be irrelevant from the point of view of scoring answers on PPCG.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I see two problems with this argument - 1. I think that what the interpreter can read is source code, however weird looking it may be. And theoretically one could code directly in this language. 2. There are occasional machine language posts, they're normally not so short, but they're not disqualified. \$\endgroup\$
    – ugoren
    Oct 20, 2015 at 11:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ Question - is there a reference to what's considered a source code? \$\endgroup\$
    – ugoren
    Oct 20, 2015 at 11:35
  • \$\begingroup\$ And another point - this answer is admittedly machine generated. Does it disqualify it? \$\endgroup\$
    – ugoren
    Oct 20, 2015 at 11:36
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ugoren You linked a question there. \$\endgroup\$
    – Martin Ender
    Oct 20, 2015 at 12:37
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ugoren Theoretically, one could code directly in the "source code." But that would just be a downvote magnet. \$\endgroup\$
    – Doorknob
    Oct 20, 2015 at 12:57
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ugoren, possibly the most relevant previous question. As for your pointed mentioning of some of my kolmogorov-complexity answers, it's reasonable to draw a distinction between generated source code in a language which is commonly hand-written and generated bytecode in a language which is rarely if ever hand-written. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Oct 20, 2015 at 13:47
  • \$\begingroup\$ @PeterTaylor, the common way to develop is quite a fuzzy rule. I think more solid criteria are needed to decide on the validity or character count of an answer. And the top voted answer to the question you quoted says machine language is OK. \$\endgroup\$
    – ugoren
    Oct 20, 2015 at 17:07
  • \$\begingroup\$ @MartinBüttner, Sorry, I meant this answer. I think other answers are generated too, but this one clearly says so. \$\endgroup\$
    – ugoren
    Oct 20, 2015 at 17:08
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ugoren, but note the much-upvoted comment to that answer. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Oct 20, 2015 at 19:48
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    \$\begingroup\$ How do tokenized languages like TI-BASIC fit into this? Based on consensus (meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/1541/…), they count the tokens for the score, not the characters in the posted source code. \$\endgroup\$
    – Reto Koradi
    Oct 22, 2015 at 6:06
  • \$\begingroup\$ @RetoKoradi, I'm not sure what your point is. That seems to be an orthogonal issue. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Oct 22, 2015 at 19:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ It could be seen as an example of an established policy where we count the bytes of an intermediate code, and not of the source code. \$\endgroup\$
    – Reto Koradi
    Oct 23, 2015 at 2:24
  • \$\begingroup\$ What about Malbolge? Are all answers generated? \$\endgroup\$
    – trichoplax is on Codidact now
    Oct 23, 2015 at 12:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ (+1 for this answer - I'm just wondering if that should also mean Malbolge is not valid for answers) \$\endgroup\$
    – trichoplax is on Codidact now
    Oct 23, 2015 at 12:31
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    \$\begingroup\$ This is an interesting point, but we do have quite a few answers in machine code, and no-one has complained about them. We also have answers in which data is compressed, which people find boring but blame the challenge rather than the answerer. So I like what you say, but I'm not sure if its enforceable / being enforced. \$\endgroup\$
    – Level River St
    Oct 23, 2015 at 18:14
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There's golfscript2 (aka gs2) which also uses non-printable characters and non-ascii characters (which most languages don't use because you don't want to program in a hex editor). You could also easily compress any Burlesque program by almost ~50% by just mapping every built-in to a single character using non-printable and non-ascii ranges. But then I wouldn't want to use it anymore as my little desk calculator because I don't want to use a hexeditor for that.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Yes, but Huffman can do better. Any way you'll do it, character frequencies would not be uniform, so a variable-length encoding would still be useful. \$\endgroup\$
    – ugoren
    Oct 27, 2015 at 9:54

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