one-liner wars n.
A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see
write-only language
and line noise). The objective
is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine
in one line of operators chosen from APL's exceedingly hairy primitive set. A similar amusement
was practiced among TECO hackers and
is now popular among Perl
aficionados.
Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a
one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime
numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this:
(2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T <- iN
where `o' is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a
single character, and `i' represents the APL iota.
Here's a Perl program that prints
primes:
perl -wle '(1 x $_) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/ && print while ++ $_'
In the Perl world this game is sometimes called Perl Golf
because the player with the fewest (key)strokes wins.