Is It Christmas? Code Golf

Question

Challenge

Given that Christmas is

• December
• Month 12
• Day 25

every year: determine today's date, and whether or not today is Christmas. If it is Christmas, you must print "It's Christmas". If it is not Christmas, you must somehow wait until Christmas and then print "It's Christmas".

Example

From this StackOverflow Question

import time
while time.strftime("%b, %d", time.localtime()) != "Dec, 25":
    time.sleep(60)
print "It's Christmas"

Python in 115 Characters

Rules

Here are the rules:

• Assume that the computer's clock is always right.
• Your code must be able to be started at any time.
• Your code must print "It's Christmas" on Christmas.
• Looping is certainly not necessary, but once started your code should not stop until it has printed.
• Shortest code wins.

Answer 1

Perl + Unix, 40 chars

1until`date`=~/c 25/;say"It's Christmas"

This is the same as J B's Perl solution, except that I save a few chars by using the external date command instead of Perl's localtime.

Answer 2

Bash, 39

For those who just can't wait:

sudo date 12250000
echo It\'s Christmas

This follows all of the rules, especially the first one.

Answer 3

Unix at: 40 chars:

echo echo "It's christmas"|at -t12252359

Answer 4

PowerShell, 45 46 chars

for(;(date).date-ne'12/25'){}"It's Christmas"

It's certainly not very power-efficient, so a laptop battery might die before Christmas (reason to wish for a new one, maybe). But not sleeping is definitely shorter.

This is also locale-agnostic. And thanks to Jaykul for a nice trick in reducing this further.

Abusing the rules a bit, 45 chars

for(){"It's Christmas"*((date)-like'12/25*')}

This will print empty lines until it's Christmas, upon which it will print “It's Christmas”.

It ...

• ... can be started at any time.
• ... prints “It's Christmas” on Christmas. Several times. The whole day long. (The rules didn't say anything about how often it may be printed.)
• ... does not print “It's Christmas” on not-Christmas (although it prints an empty line in that case; can be rectified by sacrificing another character, but then this gains nothing over the more sane solution above).
• ... does not ever stop (not even after it has printed “It's Christmas” but definitely not before).

Answer 5

Perl, 44 45

perl -E'1until localtime=~/c 25/;say"It's Christmas"'

Wouldn't GMT time be sufficient? (3 characters off ;-)

Answer 6

PostScript, 90

(%Calendar%)currentdevparams begin{Month 12 eq Day 25 eq and{exit}if}loop(It's Christmas)=

Don't run on a printer, it doesn't print a page, and it will only DoS your printer until Christmas day. Then again, getting your printer back would be a nice present.

Answer 7

Perl, 45

{localtime=~/c 25/&&die"It's Christmas";redo}

Perl, 44

using ternary operator (Thanks to Ilmari Karonen).

{localtime=~/c 25/?say"It's Christmas":redo}

Answer 8

Batch file, 68 chars

:l
@date/t|findstr/c:"-12-25">nul&&echo It's Christmas&&exit
@goto l

Not usable interactively, as it kills the session. Solving that would require 5 more characters.

Also locale-sensitive. This works on my locale which uses ISO 8601 date format.

But hey, it's a batch file (by most not even regarded as a programming language). And shorter than Javascript (and on par with Python).

Answer 9

Ruby, 53

until Time.now.to_s=~/c 05/
end
puts"It's Christmas!"

Answer 10

Javascript, 51 chars

It's a CPU killer:

while(!/c 25/.test(Date()));alert("It's Christmas")

Answer 11

I wanted to do this without parsing strings. Subsequently, there's a lot of magic numbers in my code.

I did some approximation to account for leap years. No one said that it had to print it out right on 00:00:00, Dec. 25!

Perl, 80 69 57 characters

{(time-30931200)%31557600<86399?die"It's Christmas":redo}

Edited for more concise looping!

Answer 12

Mathematica, 47

While[Date[][[2;;3]]!={12,25}];"It's Christmas"

Answer 13

(pdf)eTeX - 180 chars only December 1-25.

\lccode`m`~\let\e\expandafter\def~{\ifdim900pt<\pdfelapsedtime
sp\pdfresettimer\else\e~\fi}\lowercase\e{\e\scantokens\e
{\romannumeral\numexpr (25 - \day)*96000}}It's Christmas!\bye

TeX only has a way to access the date when the program starts, and the time elapsed since the start, capped at 32768 seconds, so I need to compute the number of seconds to wait, and for each second do a loop which waits for the elapsed time to reach 1s and reset the time. (Precisely, I'm doing blocks of 900 seconds.)

Working for any month requires more work: 355 chars.

\lccode`m=`~\let\o\or\let\y\year\let\n\numexpr\let\e\expandafter
\def\b#1{\ifnum#1=\n(#1/4)*4\relax+1\fi}\def~{\ifdim
900pt<\pdfelapsedtime sp\pdfresettimer\else\e~\fi}\lowercase
\e{\e\scantokens\e{\romannumeral\n(25-\day+\ifcase\month\o334\b\y
\o303\b\y\o275\o244\o214\o183\o153\o122\o91\o61\o30\o0\ifnum25<\day
365\b{\n\y+1}\fi\fi)*96000}}It's Christmas!\bye

Answer 14

Javascript, 93 89 78 77 chars

function x(){Date().match("c 25")?alert("It's Christmas"):setTimeout(x,1)}x()

Answer 15

D, 130

import std.datetime,std.stdio;
main(){
do{
auto t = Clock.currTime();
}while(t.month!=12||t.day!=25);
writeln("It's Christmas");
}

Answer 16

Python, 68

import time
while'c 25'not in time.asctime():1
print"It's Christmas"

Answer 17

Groovy, 55

while(!new Date()==~/.*c 25.*/);
println"It's Christmas"

Think it works, but still waiting for output.

Answer 18

Q, 63 chars

system"t 1000";.z.ts:{$["12.25"~-5#-3!.z.d;1"It's Christmas";]}

will work for christmas day on every year

Answer 19

Groovy - 88

new Timer().schedule({print"It's Christmas"}as TimerTask,Date.parse("yyddMM","112512"))

Answer 20

bash-n-date: 69 chars:

sleep $(($(date -d"12/25" +%s)-$(date +%s))) && echo "It's X-Ray    "

But it will fail on Dec. 26th to Dec. 31th.

Answer 21

MySQL, 180 chars

Because what are you using your database engine for, anyway?

DELIMITER $$
CREATE FUNCTION c() RETURNS CHAR(14) BEGIN a: LOOP IF DAY(NOW())=25 && MONTH(NOW())=12 THEN RETURN 'It\'s Christmas'; END IF; END LOOP a; END$$
DELIMITER ;
SELECT c();

Not very competitive lengthwise, but hey, it's doable!

Answer 22

Q (60)

 system"t 1000";.z.ts:{if[.z.d~2012.12.25;1"It’s Christmas"]}