Questions tagged [policy]
This tag indicates that your question is about site policies. Usually, new proposals for policies or questions about existing ones will have this tag
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Loopholes that are forbidden by default
There are a number of standard loopholes which experienced question-setters seek to explicitly close. However, inexperienced question-setters may unintentionally leave them open, or respondents may ...
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Default for Code Golf: Input/Output methods
It looks like we have a consensus that we want certain defaults for the format which answers are expected in for code-golf. On that poll, the question arose twice, which input/output formats should be ...
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Things to avoid when writing challenges
If there is something that you find annoying / counterproductive / unfair / detrimental / no longer funny in challenges (question posts), describe it in an answer here, and propose a recommended ...
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Let's allow newer languages/versions for older challenges
I've been thinking for a long time that our non-competing policy for newer languages (or language versions) is harmful. Just for context, we currently require all answers which require implementations ...
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Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
Quite a few code-golf questions require output to be "truthy or falsey". This is possibly confusing as these terms can possibly mean different things to different people, and especially in different ...
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What are programming languages? [duplicate]
Often, answers to questions asking for "programs" or talking about "programming languages" utilize things like sed, awk, … in ...
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A proposal to combat Meta Bloat™: The Big Consensus Freeze
I believe it's a widely acknowledged problem in this community that the number of meta posts a new user needs to know to figure out all the rules has long got out of hand. We require certain answer ...
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Default for Code Golf: Program, Function or Snippet?
One of the things many (new?) users forget to specify in code-golf challenges is whether the answers should provide a full program or a function (or even just a snippet). For most such things, we have ...
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When can APL characters be counted as 1 byte each?
Prompted by this.
The question of APL's encoding often comes up, and many times a helpful soul links to Wikipedia's article on the APL EBCDIC codepage. However, each implementation of APL has its own ...
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We need to take an official stance on code trolling
Here's our to-do list for the project:
Close all existing code-trolling questions (or maybe re-tag those three I mentioned).
status-declined - if locked or deleted, closing might not matter, so we ...
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Can numeric input/output be in unary?
Some string-based languages (including but not limited to sed, Retina, ///) can't really handle integer arithmetic in decimal (or other normal bases). Therefore, these almost always have to start by ...
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Standard definitions of terms within specifications
Quite often I find that I am repeating myself when creating a challenge. For example, usually I have to retype the definition of "random" in all of my posts, or I have to specify the same thing about ...
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Definitive policy about answers not meeting the challenge specification
This question has been asked so often, I have no idea what our actual policy is:
Almost-correct answers
Should answers that break the rules be deleted?
Should we flag and delete Not an Answer posts?
...
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What constitutes a "free" language for cops and robbers?
Recently Isaac proposed that using non-free, i.e. pay-to-use, languages for cops and robbers challenges should be considered a standard loophole. As Dennis stated in a comment, there is some ambiguity ...
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Definite policy about duplicate answers
Every now and then, we get an answer flag the declares an answer a duplicate of another. So far, I haven't really acted on them – except for leaving a comment if the flagger hadn't done so already – ...
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How should Community Wikis be used?
Community Wikis (CWs) seem to be an often misunderstood feature on Stack Exchange in general. For instance, I'm often seeing them used to avoid gaining reputation when the author feels they don't ...
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Is it OK to promote my own posts in chat?
Occasionally I see other users posting links to their own answers or challenges in The Nineteenth Byte. Is this OK? Can I promote my own posts as well?
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Do function submissions have to be reusable?
Simple question: if I answer a code golf with a function (for a task which is supposed to terminate), does the function actually have to be reusable? Or could it, say, modify some globals which break ...
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Untestable languages
What is the general feeling about answer that can't be tested because no compiler or interpreter is available?
The accepted answer to this question is a case in point. The question has been raised in ...
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ASCII Art Output Rules
I know there's a desire on PPCG for challenges to be flexible in terms of what they allow for input and output. However, I think there is an argument to be made that ascii-art is a special case, and ...
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Let's decide what kind of non-challenge questions we want once and for all
4 reopen votes and 1 delete vote is a strange thing to see. It's also slightly worrying that we have so little consensus on this matter. So let's bring the community together.
What kind of non-...
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Should Booleans be allowed where a number is required?
This is a rather common inquiry in contests that require computing elements of a sequence.
For example, consider the following recursive implementation of the factorial function (Python):
...
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The view from a newcomer (or an unwary traveller)
I had a small programming problem,
Checking a file contains only null bytes. Having
chanced on PPCG a few days before, I thought this could be an
interesting place to see various ways someone might go ...
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Should question/challenge titles always be in English?
There's some dispute over this challenge's title. The author originally created it as "Многочлены Чебышёва". A user edited it to "Chebyshev Polynomials" (an imperfect translation, ...
user45941
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Is it permitted for a submission to terminate merely with probability 1?
The question is in the title. I'm interested in submissions that terminate with probability 1 but have unbounded worst case running times.
This is related to the question Do programs have to ...
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On scoring builtin functions
Suppose there's a challenge which can be solved completely by a builtin function, and functions are allowed. Note that as of writing the standard loophole for builtins is heavily disputed, but let's ...
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Should submissions be allowed to exit with an error?
Suppose we have the following Python code:
f=lambda x:x*2
X
The first line defines a function which doubles a number. Then the second line is reached, is found ...
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Is this an acceptable way to shave a byte in ES6?
Say there's a challenge with two inputs. Can we submit a function signature like this?
a=>b=>...
Instead of
...
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Are baseline submissions serious contenders?
One of PPCG's oldest rules, mentioned in What topics can I ask about here?, is that all answers to challenge questions must:
Be a serious contender for the winning criteria in use. For example, an ...
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What character encodings may a submission use?
In code-golf questions, we typically score submissions by their byte count. However, whenever a submission uses a character outside of the ASCII range, the question of which encoding the code uses ...
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What details should always be given for a code golf task?
Related: For Code Golf, how do you deal with languages without a traditional print/echo statements?
Related: What programming language should we consider for the code-golf solution ?
Related: Use of ...
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Default acceptable image I/O methods for image related challenges
I do not feel that the default general acceptable I/O methods sufficiently cover image-processing and graphical-output challenges. So I would like to poll.
What are the default acceptable I/O methods ...
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Can I ask a question seeking feature requests for a golfing language?
I noticed an old question, An improved version of GolfScript, which asked, as a tips question, for people to suggest ways to improve GolfScript. This was a well-received question, but times may have ...
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What does "taking no input" mean for a program?
Fixed output challenges usually state that the program "must take no input". I usually interpret this as "The standard input is empty", but after thinking about this, there are actually several valid ...
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Are languages like sed exempt from "no input" rules?
Some types of challenges require submission that produce constant output and, as such, forbid the solutions from taking input of any kind.
That presents a problem for languages like sed, which ...
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Are physical analogs of programming legitimate?
By physical analogs, I mean solutions written via objects in the physical world. Specifically, I am referring to a couple solutions to this challenge (including my own and a couple others).
Should ...
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Are control characters and ANSI escape codes allowed in output?
Recently, I had people go crazy with escape codes on one of my ASCII art challenges.
This x86 machine code answer was able to save some bytes by throwing a few colour codes at the console. At some ...
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Is an answer allowed to use undefined, but consistent behaviour?
A lot of languages have behaviour that is not defined in the official spec, or might lack a spec in the first place. If the behaviour is consistent and even well known, can such behaviour be used ...
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Command-line flags on front ends
Our standard policy regarding command-line flags states that one should count the space before the dash (-) too, when there aren't any "free" options, since it ...
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What is our consensus on floating point issues?
As far as I can tell, we don't yet have a definitive Meta consensus to the following question:
Are answers allowed to work "in theory" but fail in practice due to floating point issues?
...
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Are pure programming puzzles on topic?
The tag wiki for programming puzzle says:
A programming puzzle includes a goal, a partially completed program,
and rules outlining how the program can be modified. The program is
specifically ...
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What additional information should be allowed in a submission?
Unlike traditional coding competition sites, submissions (answers) on PPCG are free form; the only hard requirement is that all submissions must contain the scoring header and the code that solves the ...
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Do programs have to terminate?
This is related to Sp3000's question earlier, but probably a separate issue:
Are programs required to terminate, provided they print the desired output before entering an endless loop and can be ...
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When should rule changes count?
Related: When is it allowable to change the rules?
As noted in the linked meta post above, it's typically particularly frowned upon to significantly change the rules of a challenge after posting it. ...
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May `dc` take negative input as it's designed to?
In the language dc, the - character is reserved strictly for subtraction, so it cannot be used to enter a negative number. An ...
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Ethics of posting if you're a bad programmer
I'm not a great (or, really, that good of a) programmer, but I enjoy reading other people's challenges, and thought I'd try my hand at submitting a few challenges myself. However, I don't see myself ...
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Do all challenges have to be answered with code?
We have a tag fastest-algorithm and we've had it for a while now. Submissions are scored based on the time complexity of the algorithm. This means that the actual implementation has no effect on the ...
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Guidelines for posting and closing popularity contests
In light of the controversy sparked by this question, I think we need to create a general "rule of thumb" policy on how objective a popularity-contest needs to be in order to be on-topic.
The main ...
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"Way too long" - Allowed or Disallowed?
During my time at PPCG I've seen many answers which don't post the byte count, but instead put "way too long". For example, Thomas Kwa's answer here. I have also seen this on a plethora of Java ...
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Where should we put robbers?
Just in case you didn't know already, we have a fairly new type of challenge: cops-and-robbers
I enjoy these challenges very much, but I don't know if the current format (cops post answers, robbers ...
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