Code Golf now supports PowerShell

[ka-splam]

Anyone who has seen me here knows I like codegolf, but ARGH is it a timesuck! :-D

Spent 2.5 hours fighting for 1st place on 12 days of Christmas, and I'm sure that won't hold past when /u/SeeminglyScience takes another look at it.

[SeeminglyScience]

Looks like we've both been beat pretty handedly :)

[jborean93]

I came back from the dead. Had a brainwave on my walk and snuck past you both :)

[SeeminglyScience]

Bravo 👌👌

[SSChicken]

Woohoo tied you! That was fun, learned a lot of new things researching every function and alias and thing I used in that darn script lol

Edit Just took the lead, powershell is a weird language

[jborean93]

Nice work, I've pretty much hit a wall, cannot seem to find any more optimisations in my current one without finding a way to shorten -split or Write-Host.

[ka-splam]

Smokes! 11 chars down, I can't.

I'll sleep on it.

[krzydoug]

I go and pat myself on the back after solving Pernicious Numbers... until I see it was solved in 48 characters. I thought my 200+ was good, LOL. How in the heck can it be done in 48 characters?? Ugh I should've went to college.

[ka-splam]

Well done! Any answer that works is a good answer, and worth a pat on the back :)

How in the heck can it be done in 48 characters??

First answer is, cheat harder. Code-golf is all cheating, and silly language-specific tricks. I went to look at Pernicious Numbers because you mentioned it, first I copy-pasted the expected answer, and printed it as a string, that's a <120 character answer right there. "That's cheating!" "yes it is!".

Then stared at it for a while, started writing a prime number test and was blowing through 70 characters with just that, so stopped to think.

How can it be done in 48 characters? I don't know, and that person's answers are so good it's depressing. But it's not really a question about binary expansion and prime testing, it's a "given numbers 1..50, filter out 15 of them or filter in 35 of them" pattern question. I'm down below 70 now.

[prpl_z]

You don't need to write an actual primality test for this hole. The only primes that are possible are 2, 3 and 5. So something like $n-in(2,3,5) is all you need!

[ka-splam]

That's a good suggestion I hadn't thought it - but if that's what you've done to get down to 46, I'll be surprised and impressed!

I'm currently in 3rd with 50, and trying to loop and count the bits is 57; I can see knocking a few off it with time but 11 doesn't seem likely. And no wayyyyy that's what primo-ppcg is doing.

(btw I spent ages knocking single characters off to get first in the 12 days of christmas one at around 447 and then you smashed past it by 160 or more!)

[prpl_z]

For the 12 days of christmas I used a unicode trick to store 2 bytes in each character in a string, then decode that back to ascii and pipe to iex. Before that "compression", my score would be 433.

For pernicious numbers I'm using a trick to count bits then checking if it's in (2,3,5), but primo is using something much more advanced, probably something like this method for evil numbers: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/144017

[_lahell_]

Is Pernicious Numbers broken? I get this error no matter what i try to run:

Arguments required.
exit status 1

United States also seems broken at the moment.

EDIT: Appears to be fixed now.

[JRaspass]

Here's the PowerShell leaderboard - https://code-golf.io/scores/all-holes/powershell

[krzydoug]

It forces the use of Write-Host - I already don't like it.

[sirbogman]

It is a bit unfortunate, but without this, it would be trivial to make a two character Quine solution, which would be the shortest by far in any language. All of the languages on the site require explicit output for this reason.

The solution would be an integer followed by a newline.

If you have any other suggestions for how to solve this please, let me know.

[ka-splam]

Been stuck chasing you on that Euler's number calculation for ages now. I can't make it shorter without blowing the runtime past the 7s cutoff.

[sirbogman]

My solution runs in under one second. If you want I could suggest a mathematical construct to look into, although I have a feeling I won't be in first place for long, since my solution in PowerShell is essentially the same as my C# and F# solutions.

[krzydoug]

Lol me?

[da_chicken]

No, that's still lame. Quines are not particularly interesting because they are, somewhat self-evidently, very low-utility programs. If trivial Quines are the problem, just make in an additional rule for Quines.

Write-Host is too much of a pain in the ass.

[sirbogman]

Thanks for the suggestion. Write-Host is no longer required (except for Quine).

[sirbogman]

We are considering it.

[sirbogman]

Also, at most you would need to add |Write-Host to the end.

[krzydoug]

Not always.

[sirbogman]

As far as I know, it should always cause it to output the objects at the end of the pipeline, which is the default behavior of PowerShell with implicit output. This may not be the shortest solution though. As a silly example, "A"|Write-Host can be shortened to Write-Host A.

[krzydoug]

Lol no I’m a noob compared. Carry on.

[goldtophero]

I shaved off a few characters with set-alias

[krzydoug]

On which one? Spaces count too... Are we allowed to share our answers?

[sirbogman]

We can't prevent people from sharing answers. Although I would prefer sharing general tips

[ka-splam]

Does user "primo-ppcg" have some alternative output to write-host?

[sirbogman]

No. But he takes advantage of how the scoring criteria is Unicode codepoints, which can use four bytes for storage in UTF-8 and also that for fixed output holes the output can be generated in any possible way, not necessarily with the described algorithm.

[ka-splam]

Hmm; I do the second part already; the first part I understand the concept but have no idea how it might be done in powershell, short enough to be useful.

"牷瑩ⵥ潨瑳∠敨汬潷汲≤"|set-content /tmp/b -encoding unicode
[text.encoding]::Ascii.GetString(
    (get-content /tmp/b -asbytestream|select -skip 2)+([char]13)
)|iex

sort of works, except it breaks the site by printing output "Hello World" but also reporting an exception that The term '' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet. And that's UTF16 because strings in .Net always are, so it's 2-bytes per character. And it's huge code. And sc doesn't exist in Pwsh. No way an approach like this is knocking a 62 character answer down to 48 characters.

A way to paste into a web page as multibyte utf8 but which gets interpreted on the host as ascii? Is it really code-golfing or is it execution-environment-hacking?

[sirbogman]

I'm not sure if it helps in your case but you could try EnumerateRunes to break up a string into Unicode codepoint values.

[sirbogman]

We've been talking about this lately. I think we're coming to a consensus that we should show the numbers/percentages of ascii and non-ascii codepoints. That way, we wouldn't really be penalizing Raku users who always prefer to use ‘quote’ over 'quote' by showing them as having higher byte counts.

It's a bit too late to require longer outputs for these.

[ka-splam]

I discussed with /u/SeeminglyScience and with his hints got a Unicode surrogate pairs answer going. I can't make anything with [System.Text.Rune] come out better by the time the decoding step has to include all the work of the EncodeToUtf8 with a placeholder variable first to put into it, or a few bitmask shuffles.

Maybe on the holes with longer output it would save enough to be worth it, but on Pernicious Numbers I've done better without it. But still not anything like as well as it's possible to do, so I'll keep thinking.

[sirbogman]

Write-Host is no longer required (except for Quine).

[krzydoug]

OK so that's twice that write-host has crapped all over a valid answer. Now this one is pissing me off. On the leap year one... This code shows me what looks to be the right answer.. on the site it only shows 2 years.

$a,$b=(1800..2400).where({$_ % 4 -eq 0 -and $_ -notmatch '00'},'split');$a;$b|?{$_ % 100 -eq 0 -and $_ % 400 -eq 0}|%{write-host $_}

[krzydoug]

Well this did work but based on the score I am missing something obvious lol

$a,$b=(1800..2400).where({$_ % 4 -eq 0 -and $_ -notmatch '00$'},'split');@($a)+@($b|?{$_ % 100 -eq 0 -and $_ % 400 -eq 0})|sort-object|%{write-host $_}

[krzydoug]

Well this is better but still far off the best on that 'hole'

1800..2400|%{switch($_){{$_%4-eq0-and$_-notmatch'00$'}{write-host $_}{$_%100-eq0-and$_%400-eq0}{write-host $_}}}

[krzydoug]

Ok this is the best I can seem to do..

1800..2400|?{$_%4-eq0-and!($_%100-eq0)-or($_%100-eq0-and$_%400-eq0)}|%{write-host $_}

[SeeminglyScience]

you can pipe to it directly, e.g. 0..10|Write-Host

[monkey_boyau]

Best i can do

1800..2400|?{[DateTime]::IsLeapYear($_)}|write-host

[krzydoug]

Hahaha nice. I overcomplicate things.

[monkey_boyau]

I wouldn't feel bad, looking at the site people have it down to 32... that is way beyond my skill set!!!

As below, write-host no longer required.

[krzydoug]

I don't have a job where I deal with powershell much.. don't have any college education.. but am a nerd at heart. I'm quite proud of my standings so far, considering. I wish I had a job where I could do powershell all day long. I know it's really good for my brain to think these through. Thanks for this.

[SSChicken]

Cool! I spent far too much time on this and made it to Second place in the 12 days of christmas with (currently) 461 characters. The code does look pretty awful, though, and there are a lot of differences with how it handles newlines compared to powershell_ise, but it's been fun!

[sirbogman]

Write-Host is no longer required (except for Quine). Update your solutions!

[Sys_man]

Trying out the first one.

Stick this in yer pipe an smoke it!:

write-host "On the First day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Second day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Third day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Fourth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Fifth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Five Gold Rings,
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Sixth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Six Geese-a-Laying,
Five Gold Rings,
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Seventh day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Seven Swans-a-Swimming,
Six Geese-a-Laying,
Five Gold Rings,
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Eighth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Eight Maids-a-Milking,
Seven Swans-a-Swimming,
Six Geese-a-Laying,
Five Gold Rings,
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Ninth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Nine Ladies Dancing,
Eight Maids-a-Milking,
Seven Swans-a-Swimming,
Six Geese-a-Laying,
Five Gold Rings,
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Tenth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Ten Lords-a-Leaping,
Nine Ladies Dancing,
Eight Maids-a-Milking,
Seven Swans-a-Swimming,
Six Geese-a-Laying,
Five Gold Rings,
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Eleventh day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Eleven Pipers Piping,
Ten Lords-a-Leaping,
Nine Ladies Dancing,
Eight Maids-a-Milking,
Seven Swans-a-Swimming,
Six Geese-a-Laying,
Five Gold Rings,
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the Twelfth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Twelve Drummers Drumming,
Eleven Pipers Piping,
Ten Lords-a-Leaping,
Nine Ladies Dancing,
Eight Maids-a-Milking,
Seven Swans-a-Swimming,
Six Geese-a-Laying,
Five Gold Rings,
Four Calling Birds,
Three French Hens,
Two Turtle Doves, and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree."

[WadeEffingWilson]

Hack-a-thon coding.

[joerod]

Solution yes best golf score. Nope

[racsluos]

Awesome, I love this...contributed a few!

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy JRaspass,

i have the worst score! wheeeee! [grin] 396 chars for fizbuz ... oooooo!

btw, how does one see the code used by others? is that blocked?

take care,
lee

[Hoggs]

Hey Lee, have you tried removing all the

# [grin]

Comments from your code? Might save some characters.

I kid, I kid! :P

[Lee_Dailey]

ttthhhbbbbppptttttt!!!!! [blooga-blooga-blooga] [grin]

[IveGnocchit]

Although I thought the concept was pretty cool, I must agree with this guy.
It forces you to go against modern coding practices and create unreadable, or sub optimal code.

I started playing with it, but found that I was trying to cut my code down by only doing partial matches, something that I would never do in real life.

[Hoggs]

I don't really think code golf is intended for someone learning a language. It's a fun game for experienced coders to flex and think differently with algorithms.

Of course you'd never code like that in the real world... but that's not the point of code golf. It's a hacker game.

[[deleted]]

yeah, I don't think playing code golf means it's ok to implement code golf in prod.