There Was an Old Lady

Question

Your goal is to write a program that prints the following poem exactly as it appears here:

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.  
I don't know why she swallowed that fly,  
Perhaps she'll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,  
That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her.  
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,  
I don't know why she swallowed that fly,  
Perhaps she'll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a bird,  
How absurd to swallow a bird.  
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,  
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,  
I don't know why she swallowed that fly,  
Perhaps she'll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a cat,  
Imagine that to swallow a cat.  
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,  
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,  
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,  
I don't know why she swallowed that fly,  
Perhaps she'll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a dog,  
What a hog to swallow a dog.  
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,  
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,  
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,  
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,  
I don't know why she swallowed that fly,  
Perhaps she'll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a horse,  
She died of course.

The text must appear exactly as it does here, and fewest characters wins.

Edit: Your program may not access the internet.

Answer 1

Perl 5.10, 392 384 372 235 369 (ASCII) / 234 (Unicode)

The shortest ASCII version of this is 369 characters long:

@_=(fly,spider,bird,cat,dog);$_="There was an old lady who!ed a";for$P("",",
That wrJand Jand jJinside her",",
How absurd&",",
Imagine that&",",
What a hog&"){$p=$c;$c=$".shift@_;$t=$p?"She!ed the$c to catch the$p,
$t":"I don't know why she!ed that$c,
Perhaps she'll die.

$_";$_.="$c$P.
$t";s/&/ to! a$c/}s/!/ swallow/g;s/J/iggled /g;say"$_ horse,
She died of course."

It started from this base program:

my @animals = qw(fly spider bird cat dog);
my $buf = "There was an old lady who swallowed a ";
for my $phrase ( "",
                 ",\nThat wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her",
                 ",\nHow absurd&",
                 ",\nImagine that&",
                 ",\nWhat a hog&" ) { 
  $previous = $current;
  $current = shift @animals;
  $trail = $previous ? "She swallowed the $current to catch the $previous,\n$trail"
                     : "I don't know why she swallowed that $current,\n"
                       . "Perhaps she'll die.\n\n$buf";
  $buf .= "$current$phrase.\n$trail";
  $buf =~ s/&/ to swallow a $current/;
}
say "$buf horse,\nShe died of course.";

The core idea is to keep the end of the rhyme and the beginning of the next one in $trail, augmenting it as we go along. It's made non-trivial by the need of a special case for the first use, and the attempt to re-use the animal name variable even in the animal-specific phrase. Further optimizations include:

• one-character identifiers for everything
• using barewords instead of quoted strings for the animal list
• use of the accumulator $_ for $buf to shorten most substitution operations even more (use of @_ is by force of habit and doesn't win anything more than any other character)
• including the preceding space directly inside the animal name variable (the space character taken from the $" variable)
• regexp substitution to shorten the most common phrases: ' swallow' and 'iggled '
• no code spacing whatsoever and all \n in string literals replaced with actual newlines

All but the last optimization yield this:

@_ = (fly, spider, bird, cat, dog);
$_ = "There was an old lady who!ed a";
for $P ( "",
         ",\nThat wrJand Jand jJinside her",
         ",\nHow absurd&",
         ",\nImagine that&",
         ",\nWhat a hog&" ) { 
  $p = $c;
  $c = $" . shift @_;
  $t = $p ? "She!ed the$c to catch the$p,\n$t"
          : "I don't know why she!ed that$c,\nPerhaps she'll die.\n\n$_";
  $_ .= "$c$P.\n$t";
  s/&/ to! a$c/;
}
s/!/ swallow/g;
s/J/iggled /g;
say "$_ horse,\nShe died of course.";

Additionally, this golf is a victim of the underspecified encoding problem. As it—as of now—counts individual characters instead of bytes in a specified encoding, there's a big gain to be achieved by decoding the program source from UCS2 before starting. The final result isn't very readable anymore, but it's short all right. (234 characters, counted as a difference from perl -E'' as usual) (I had to include the trailing newline back to make it valid UCS2)

$ perl -MEncode=from_to -e'$_="䁟㴨晬礬獰楤敲Ɫ楲搬捡琬摯朩㬤弽≔桥牥⁷慳⁡渠潬搠污摹⁷桯Ⅵ搠愢㭦潲⑐⠢∬∬੔桡琠睲䩡湤⁊慮搠橊楮獩摥⁨敲∬∬ੈ潷⁡扳畲搦∬∬੉浡杩湥⁴桡琦∬∬੗桡琠愠桯朦∩笤瀽④㬤挽␢⹳桩晴䁟㬤琽⑰㼢卨攡敤⁴桥④⁴漠捡瑣栠瑨攤瀬ਤ琢㨢䤠摯渧琠歮潷⁷桹⁳桥Ⅵ搠瑨慴④Ⰺ健牨慰猠獨攧汬⁤楥⸊ਤ弢㬤弮㴢④⑐⸊⑴∻猯☯⁴漡⁡④⽽猯ℯ⁳睡汬潷⽧㭳⽊⽩杧汥搠⽧㭳慹∤张桯牳攬੓桥⁤楥搠潦⁣潵牳攮∊";from_to($_,utf8,ucs2);eval'

A good thing there was a lot to golf from before resorting to Unicode, or it wouldn't be much fun.

Edit: can't find a way to copy/paste the 234-character version to this browser, so I'm leaving the 235-character one. Will fix this evening, when I get my hands on a real UTF8-aware clipboard. found a way. Quasi-proof on ideone.

Answer 2

Perl, 120 94 chars

Count includes call to the interpreter.

You did say to reproduce it exactly as it does here ;)

perl -MLWP::Simple -E'($p=get("http://goo.gl/kg17j"))=~s#^.+?pr.*?de>|</co.*?re>.+$##sg;say$p'

N.B.

This solution is what prompted the 'no-Internet' restriction. Let it be a lesson for future code-golf question specifications :)

Answer 3

Python 3.x: 407 chars

import base64,zlib;print(zlib.decompress(base64.b64decode(b'eNrlkLFOxDAQRPt8xXTXoHwHdEhEot7L+myD8Z7snKz8Pd6LT7mgFFQIRGftPs/OzOBMMiiUQRESGIF4RnGCXCgEKYZBOIW5B7onsMTDhPcopTIzsjN33ORoUvShos8mOTpnJQ4hgL3pu2741rF89mySigwqWJK3NugmMu6eb+3tY648qrRafPniyDQ5TIKRptFdZ83kz+Q5+sQq8ViP0DFfEquZRrT9vnXdbI2v3fzCoPXs9dgHWR/NorpJWoH9oONCrr5vnf35TlisKryqGsGJ3TZS1/uN8EKurlu5/6k7Jymbm7f6kSEnjHKp0/4TSSOZgA==')).decode('utf8'))

Answer 4

Ruby, 436 characters

w=" swallowed "
f="There was an old lady who#{w}a "
c=" to swallow a %s"
b="dog","cat","bird","spider","fly"
s=nil,"That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her","How absurd"+c,"Imagine that"+c,"What a hog"+c
a=[]
5.times{k=g=b.pop;t,*s=s
puts f+k+(t ??,:?.),t&&[t%k+?.,a.map{|x|y,k=k,x;"She#{w}the #{y} to catch the #{k},"}],"I don't know why she#{w}that fly,","Perhaps she'll die.",""
a=[g]+a}
puts f+"horse,","She died of course."

Answer 5

Haskell, 515 498

Score does not count newlines and spaces added for presentation.

b c a="There was an old lady who swallowed a "++a++c++".\n"
t r a=b(",\n"++r++" to swallow a "++a)a
s(a,b)="She swallowed the "++a++" to catch the "++b++",\n"
z=["fly","spider","bird","cat","dog"]
h=[b"",b",\nThat wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her",t"How absurd",
 t"Imagine that",t"What a hog"]
v(g,p)=g++(=<<)s(zip p$tail p)++
 "I don't know why she swallowed that fly,\nPerhaps she'll die.\n\n"
main=putStr$(=<<)v(zip(zipWith($)h z)(tail$scanl(flip(:))[]z))++b
 ",\nShe died of course""horse"

Ungolfed:

type Animal = String
type Comment = String

beginning :: Animal -> Comment -> String
beginning animal comment = "There was an old lady who swallowed a " ++ animal ++ comment ++ ".\n"

ending :: String
ending = "I don't know why she swallowed that fly,\nPerhaps she'll die.\n\n"

to_swallow :: String -> Animal -> Comment
to_swallow start animal = ",\n" ++ start ++ " to swallow a " ++ animal

swallowed_to_catch :: (Animal, Animal) -> String
swallowed_to_catch (a, b) = "She swallowed the " ++ a ++ " to catch the " ++ b ++ ",\n"

animals :: [(Animal, Animal -> Comment)]
animals = [("fly",    const "")
          ,("spider", const ",\nThat wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her")
          ,("bird",   to_swallow "How absurd")
          ,("cat",    to_swallow "Imagine that")
          ,("dog",    to_swallow "What a hog")
          ]

-- Turn [1,2,3,4,5] into [[1], [2,1], [3,2,1], [4,3,2,1], [5,4,3,2,1]]
trail :: [a] -> [[a]]
trail = tail . scanl (flip (:)) []

verses :: [String]
verses = zipWith verse animals (trail $ map fst animals)

verse :: (Animal, Animal -> Comment) -> [Animal] -> String
verse (animal, comment) swallow_chain =
    beginning animal (comment animal) ++
    concatMap swallowed_to_catch (zip swallow_chain (tail swallow_chain)) ++
    ending

poem :: String
poem = concat verses ++ beginning "horse" ",\nShe died of course"

main :: IO ()
main = putStr poem

Answer 6

Python, 484

Ok, I did it but was pretty boring...

The last sentence is always with "fly" so some chars were removed...

f,s,b,c,d=o='fly spider bird cat dog'.split()
x='There was an old lady who swallowed a %s.\n'
t=' to swallow a %s.\n'
r=['That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her.\n','How absurd'+t%b,'Imagine that'+t%c,'What a hog'+t%d]
t=("She swallowed the %s to catch the %s,\n"*4%(d,c,c,b,b,s,s,f)).split('\n')
print("I don't know why she swallowed that fly,\nPerhaps she'll die.\n\n".join([x%f]+[x%o[i]+r[i-1]+'\n'.join(t[-i-1:])for i in range(1,5)]+[''])+x%'horse'+'She died of course.')

Less golfed version:

f,s,b,c,d = all = 'fly spider bird cat dog'.split()

what = 'There was an old lady who swallowed a %s.\n'

t = ' to swallow a %s.\n'
comments = ['That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her.\n',
            'How absurd' + t%b,
            'Imagine that' + t%c,
            'What a hog' + t%d]

swallowed = "She swallowed the %s to catch the %s,\n"
lines = (swallowed*4%(d,c,c,b,b,s,s,f)).split('\n')

end = '''I don't know why she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she'll die.\n\n'''

def who_catch_who(i):
    return '\n'.join(lines[-i-1:])

p = end.join([what % f] + 
             [what % all[i] +
              comments[i-1] +
              who_catch_who(i) for i in range(1,5)] +
             [''])

print(p + what % 'horse' + 'She died of course.')

Answer 7

C, for fun (561 chars)

Score does not count newlines and spaces added for presentation.

Thanks to J B for his improvements!

#include <stdio.h>

void main() {
    char *e = "\nShe swallowed the cat to catch the bird,\nShe swallowed the bird to catch the spider,\nShe swallowed the spider to catch the fly,\nI don't know why she swallowed that fly,\nPerhaps she'll die.\n\nThere was an old lady who swallowed a ";
    printf("%sfly.%sspider,\nThat wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her.%sbird,\nHow absurd to swallow a bird.%scat,\nImagine that to swallow a cat.%sdog,\nWhat a hog to swallow a dog.\nShe swallowed the dog to catch the cat,%shorse,\nShe died of course.", e+191, e+128, e+85, e+41, e, e);
}

Answer 8

Scala (706 619 599 550 chars)

val L=Seq("fly","spider","bird","cat","dog")
val M="\nThere was an old lady who %sed a %s,"
type S=String
def s(l:S,a:S="",b:S="")=l.format("swallow",a,b)
def p(l:S,a:S=""){println(s(l,a))}
var i=0
var r=List[S]()
L.map{a=>{p(M,a)
if(i>0){p(Seq("","That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her.","How absurd","Imagine that","What a hog")(i)+(if(i>1)" to %s a %s."else""),a)
r::=s("She %sed the %s to catch the %s,",L(i),L(i-1))
r.map(p(_))}
p("I don't know why she %sed that fly,\nPerhaps she'll die.")
i+=1}}
p(M,"horse")
p("She died of course.")

Using map instead of foreach allows to squeeze more chars... In codegolf, we don't care about performance, elegance (non-mutability) or logic...

Answer 9

C#, 556 chars

class P{static void Main(){string a="There was an old lady who swallowed a ",b="I don't know why she swallowed that ",c="She swallowed the ",d=" to catch the ",e="Perhaps she'll die.\n\n",f="fly",g="spider",h="bird",i="cat",j="dog",k=",\n",l=".\n",m="to swallow a ",n=c+g+d+f+k,o=c+h+d+g+k,p=b+f+k,q=c+i+d+h+k,r=n+p,s=o+r,t=q+s,u=e+a;System.Console.Write(a+f+l+p+u+g+k+"That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her"+l+r+u+h+k+"How absurd "+m+h+l+s+u+i+k+"Imagine that "+m+i+l+t+u+j+k+"What a hog "+m+j+l+c+j+d+i+k+t+u+"horse"+k+"She died of course.");}}

Answer 10

JavaScript (422)

Works in the SpiderMonkey interpreter versions used by both anarchy golf and ideone.

for(a="fly0spider0bird0cat0dog0horse0How absurd0Imagine that0What a hog".split(i=0);p=print;p("I don't know why she swallowed that fly,\nPerhaps she'll die.\n")){p("There was an old lady who swallowed a",a[i]+(i?",":"."));i>4&&quit(p("She died of course."));i&&p(i>1?a[4+i]+" to swallow a "+a[i]+".":"That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her.");for(j=i++;j;)p("She swallowed the "+a[j]+" to catch the "+a[--j]+",")}

A bit more nicely formatted:

for (a = "fly0spider0bird0cat0dog0horse0How absurd0Imagine that0What a hog".split(i = 0);
p = print; p("I don't know why she swallowed that fly,\nPerhaps she'll die.\n")) {
    p("There was an old lady who swallowed a", a[i] + (i ? "," : "."));
    i > 4 && quit(p("She died of course."));
    i && p(i > 1
        ? a[4 + i] + " to swallow a " + a[i] + "."
        : "That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her."
    );
    for (j = i++; j;) p("She swallowed the " + a[j] + " to catch the " + a[--j] + ",");
}

Answer 11

Perl, 489 chars

sub Y{$t=pop;my$s;while($b=pop){$s.="She ${W}ed the $t to catch the $b,\n";$t=$b;}$s.=$l{fly}.$/;}$W='swallow';$w='iggled';$q=" to $W a";$o="There was an old lady who ${W}ed a";$h='hat';@f=qw/fly spider bird cat dog/;@l{@f}=("I don't know why she ${W}ed t$h fly,
Perhaps she'll die.$/","T$h wr$w and $w and j$w inside her.","How absurd$q bird.","Imagine t$h$q cat.","W$h a hog$q dog.");map{$m=$f[$_];print"$o $m,
$l{$m}
",$_?Y@f[0..$_]:'';}0..$#f;print"$o horse,
She died of course.$/"

Answer 12

Java 758 chars

Here is my Java effort ( 758 chars )

public class Poem{public static void main(String[] args){String s1="swallowed",st="There was an old lady who "+s1+" a |.",d1="Perhaps she'll die.",d2="She died ofcourse.",e="I don't know why she " + s1 + " that fly,\n";String[] a={ "fly","spider","bird","cat","dog","horse"};String[] q={ "","That wriggled and iggled and jiggled inside her.","How absurd |","Imagine that |","What a hog |",null};for(int i=0;i < a.length;i++){print(st.replace("|",a[i]));if(q[i]==null){print(d2);break;}if(!q[i].isEmpty()){               print((q[i].replace("|","to swallow a " + a[i])).trim());for(int j=i;j > 0;j--){print("She swallowed the " + a[j] + " to catch the " + a[j - 1] + ",");}}print(e + d1 + "\n");}}
static void print(String value){System.out.println(value);}}