A Silly Task
October 22, 2019
Today’s task is silly:
Your task is to write a program that, when executed, writes to the output in words the number of characters in the program. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 
This time – no cheating and no real golfing…. OK – so works up to about 100K as I haven’t got the and/, rule right above that …. The critical bits are “-s $0” gives the size of the current file!, and stuff after END is ignored – added to test code for different lengths…
#!/usr/local/bin/perl use feature qw(say); use strict; use warnings; my @u=('',qw(one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen)); my @t=('',qw(ten twenty thirty forty fifty sixty seventy eighty ninety)); my $s = -s $0; my @blocks; if( $s > 1000 ) { push @blocks, fs($s/1000).' thousand', ', '; $s %= 1000; } if( $s >= 100 ) { push @blocks, fs($s/100).' hundred',', '; $s %= 100; } push @blocks, fs($s),', ' if $s; pop @blocks; $blocks[-2] = ' and ' if @blocks > 2; ## Replace last "," with an "and". say @blocks; sub fs { my $x = shift; return $u[$x] if $x < 20; return $t[$x/10].' '.$u[$x%10] if $x%10; } __END__ Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam lacinia lacinia nisi nec sollicitudin. Suspendisse cursus scelerisque sem id accumsan. Nulla ac quam tortor. Etiam ante urna, congue eget nunc eget, sollicitudin suscipit tellus. Nunc sed erat sagittis, ultricies diam nec, dapibus mauris. Sed consectetur ex ac ligula pellentesque viverra. Fusce varius facilisis facilisis. Nunc scelerisque, nibh in iaculis lacinia, libero nunc rutrum elit, id fringilla tortor arcu nec ex. Duis bibendum nisi metus, a aliquam nibh ultrices et. Etiam vulputate, neque quis finibus porta, neque ante luctus urna, quis suscipit turpis ligula at justo. Aliquam pretium laoreet urna in tincidunt. Duis laoreet auctor nisl et imperdiet. In mattis dolor sed tristique malesuada. Vestibulum nec sagittis dolor. Phasellus quis sapien ipsum. Sed placerat lacus at mauris auctor vestibulum. .... .... ....Here is a very naive solution in R7RS Scheme that I feel is more in
keeping with the spirit of the question, which I interpreted in the
vein of Quines.
With that interpretation (which I realize may not be the author’s
intention), the solutions so far by @programmingpraxis and James Smith
are typically considered ‘”Cheating” quines”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#%22Cheating%22_quines
(import (scheme base) (scheme write)) 'buf (display "eighty") (newline)Let’s use the excellent Python num2words library to make things easier. Since num2words is multilingual, and in the interests of international solidarity, we’ll generate solutions of the form “print(…)” in a variety of languages:
from num2words import num2words for n in range(100): for lang in ['en','fr','de','it','ro','lt','lv','ar','he','vi']: s = "print('{}')\n".format(num2words(n,lang=lang)) if n == len(s.encode()): print(n,":",s,end='')Output (note that we check the encoded length, not the number of characters):
16 : print('sedici') 18 : print('eighteen') 18 : print('dix-huit') 18 : print('achtzehn') 18 : print('diciotto') 20 : print('dvidešimt') 20 : print('عشرون') 20 : print('עשרים') 20 : print('hai mươi') 21 : print('vingt et un') 23 : print('hai mươi ba') 24 : print('vierundzwanzig') 25 : print('fünfundzwanzig') 25 : print('divdesmit pieci') 25 : print('hai mươi lăm') 29 : print('douăzeci și nouă') 29 : print('עשרים ותשע') 38 : print('ثمانية و ثلاثون')Here’s a solution in Python.
base = [ 'zero', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine', 'ten', 'eleven', 'twelve', 'thirteen', 'fourteen', 'fifteen', 'sixteen', 'seventeen', 'eighteen', 'nineteen' ] tens = [ None, None, 'twenty', 'thirty', 'forty', 'fifty', 'sixty', 'seventy', 'eighty', 'ninety' ] thousands = [ None, 'thousand', 'million', 'billion', 'trillion', 'quadrillion', 'quintillion', 'sextillion', 'septillion', 'octillion', 'nonillion', 'decillion', 'undecillion', 'duodecillion', 'tredecillion', 'quattuordecillion', 'quindecillion', 'sexdecillion', 'septendecillion', 'octodecillion', 'novemdecillion', 'vigintillion', 'centillion' ] def convert(x): """Convert an integer to the corresponding words.""" if x < 0: return f'negative {convert(abs(x))}' elif x < 20: return base[x] elif x < 100: q, r = divmod(x, 10) return tens[q] if r == 0 else f'{tens[q]} {base[r]}' elif x < 1000: q, r = divmod(x, 100) return f'{base[q]} hundred {convert(r)}' else: output = [] parts = [int(part) for part in reversed(f'{x:,}'.split(','))] for part, thousand in zip(parts, thousands): if part == 0: continue words = convert(part) if thousand: words += f' {thousand}' output.append(words) return ' '.join(reversed(output)) # Assumes __file__ has path to source code, not bytecode with open(__file__) as f: print(convert(len(f.read())))Output:
Here’s a Python meta solution (ie. run the program to make a program), no libraries, no cheating. Iterate to a fix point to find the right length (proof of termination welcome):
program = """\ a = ["zero","one","two","three","four","five","six","seven","eight", "nine","ten","eleven","twelve","thirteen","fourteen","fifteen", "sixteen","seventeen","eighteen","nineteen"] b = ["twenty","thirty","forty","fifty","sixty","seventy","eighty","ninety"] def words(n): s = "" if n >= 1000: s += words(n//1000) + " thousand" n %= 1000 if n == 0: return s if n >= 100: if s: s += ", " s += words(n//100) + " hundred" n %= 100 if n == 0: return s if s: s += " and " if n >= 20: s += b[(n-20)//10] n %= 10 if n == 0: return s s += "-" s += a[n] return s print(words({})) """ def diag(program,n=0): while True: s = program.format(n) if n == len(s): return s n = len(s) print(diag(program),end="")Now we have:
A solution in Common Lisp using the loop syntax and built-in english language number formatting (“~r”).