Questions tagged [restricted-source]
Imposes a restriction on the source code used to solve the challenge, for example, having no numbers in the source code.
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Produce the number 2014 without any numbers in your source code
Note to challenge writers as per meta consensus:
This question was well-received when it was posted, but challenges
like this, asking answerers to Do X without using
Y
are likely to be poorly received....
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Without using numbers, get the highest salary you can. But don't exaggerate!
As I'm applying for some jobs whose job advert doesn't state the salary, I imagined a particularly evil interviewer that would give the candidate the possibility to decide their own salary ...by "...
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DISARM THE B.O.M.B.!
You have been hired for your tech knowledge as a Secret Agent's sidekick to ensure that the good guy can get his job done and the world can be saved.
This is your last mission before retiring with a ...
- 4,077
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70
answers
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How high can you count?
Challenge:
Your task is to write as many programs / functions / snippets as you can, where each one outputs / prints / returns an integer. The first program must output the integer ...
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Fewest (distinct) characters for Turing Completeness
Summary:
For any given language, what is the smallest amount of unique characters for your language to be Turing-Complete?
Challenge:
For any language of your choice, find the smallest subset of ...
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votes
88
answers
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Largest Number Printable
Your goal is to write a program that prints a number. The bigger the number, the more points you'll get. But be careful! Code length is both limited and heavily weighted in the scoring function. Your ...
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Obfuscated Hello World
Create the shortest possible obfuscated program that displays the text "Hello World".
In order to be considered an obfuscated program, it must meet at least two of the following requirements:
Does ...
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ASCII's 95 Characters...95 Movie Quotes
Update: The winner has been decided, but the challenge is not over!
Finally, nearly 3 months after the question first started, someone has remained the last answerer for more than a week! ...
- 88.6k
117
votes
19
answers
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"Hello, World!" in zero lines of code
NPM's sloc is a moderately popular tool for counting source lines of code in a file. The tool will attempt to strip out both single and multiline comments and count the remaining lines in order to get ...
- 13.5k
115
votes
75
answers
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I'm a palindrome. Are you?
There have been a couple of previous attempts to ask this question, but neither conforms to modern standards on this site. Per discussion on Meta, I'm reposting it in a way that allows for fair ...
user62131
103
votes
64
answers
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Find an Illegal String
The challenge is to find a string of characters that cannot appear in any legal program in your programming language of choice. That includes comments, strings, or other "non-executable" parts.
...
- 12.2k
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votes
36
answers
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Eww, those bytes are gross
Write a program or function that, when given a string, filters out as many distinct bytes as it can and returns the cleaned string. However, since your program hates them, none of these bytes can be ...
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votes
23
answers
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Programming a Pristine World
Let's define a pristine program as a program that does not have any errors itself but will error if you modify it by removing any contiguous substring of \$N\$ characters, where \$1 \le N < \text{...
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Pristine and Unique Code Bowling
Your challenge is simple: write as long of a pristine program as possible in the language of your choice using only unique bytes. (The full definition of a pristine program, copied from that link, is ...
- 1,445
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102
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Hello World 0.0!
source: Dilbert, September 8, 1992
I'm hoping to add a new twist on the classic "Hello World!" program.
Code a program that outputs Hello World! without:
String/...
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votes
210
answers
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The Letter A without A
Your task is to display the letter "A" alone, without anything else, except any form of trailing newlines if you cannot avoid them, doing so in a program and/or snippet. Code that returns (instead of ...
- 1,703
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132
answers
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Loop without 'looping' [closed]
A question similar to this has been asked a couple of years ago, but this one is even trickier.
The challenge is simple. Write a program (in your language of choice) that repeatedly executes code ...
- 1,043
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votes
70
answers
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Hello world! with limited character repetition
In a language of your choice, write a program that exactly outputs the characters Hello world! followed by a newline. The code:
should not use any character more ...
- 2,761
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votes
38
answers
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Non-discriminating Programming
We say a string is non-discriminating if each of the string's characters appears the same number of times and at least twice.
Examples
"aa!1 1 !a !1" is non-...
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Print the alphabet without using each vowel
Inspiration: in 1939, a man named Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel called Gadsby without using the letter 'e'.
Your task is to write a set of (up to 5) programs in any language (which has a text-...
- 1,231
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votes
94
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Three-Three-Three!
Write a program that produces an output such that:
At least three distinct characters appear.
The number of occurrences of each character is a multiple of 3.
For example, ...
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29
answers
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2016 Time Capsule String: How Versatile Is Your Language?
About a year ago on Dec 31, 2015, I had the idea that:
We should make a time capsule string. Everybody gets to add one character and next new years we'll see who can make the best program out of all ...
- 88.6k
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votes
183
answers
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Output your Score!
Challenge:
The concept is simple enough: write a full program to output its own code golf score!
Output should only be the byte count of your program and a trailing ...
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answers
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Print X without X (cop's thread)
This is the cop's thread of a cops-and-robbers challenge. You can view the robber's thread here
A pretty common beginner style question is to print some string, but there's a catch! You need to do it ...
- 92.2k
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votes
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No strings (or numbers) attached
If you like this, consider participating in:
The Official Dyalog APL 2016 Year Game
The monthly Dyalog APL 2017 Code Golf Challenge
Make 12 snippets/expressions, in the same language, that result in ...
- 29.1k
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Tweetable hash function challenge
In this code-challenge you will write a hash function in 140 bytes1 or less of source code. The hash function must take an ASCII string as input, and return a 24-bit unsigned integer ([0, 224-1]) as ...
- 38.9k
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votes
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Just repeat yourself
Write a program that outputs
Do not repeat yourself!
Your program code must respect the following constraints :
its length must be an even number
each ...
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votes
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answers
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Only Even Bytes
The scenario
Lately you have been noticing some strange behavior with your favorite text editor. At first it seemed that it was ignoring random characters in your code when writing to disk. After a ...
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votes
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Hash collision: "NO" means "YES"
This Code Golf was inspired by the recent Daily WTF article You Can't Handle the True!, which features a string comparison written as:
...
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votes
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answers
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Write lines in detention
Introduction
Bad news guys - you got detention. Your English teacher doesn't understand this site and wants you to "stop doing math on your digital dohickeys, this is English class!"
She ...
- 3,436
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votes
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answers
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Print 0 to 100 without 1-9 characters
Print 0 to 100 without using characters 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 in your code.
Seperator of numbers can be comma, whitespace or newline.
Shortest code wins.
user101144
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votes
31
answers
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Output the text "Code Bowling"
Code-Bowling
You've been hired by Brunswick Bowling to create a simple program to output the text Code Bowling on their monitors. This company is worth a pretty ...
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answers
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Print the phrase "And she said, 'But that's his.'" using only the alphabet
Print the phrase And she said, 'But that's his.' using only the following characters: ...
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Print every printable ASCII character without using it
In a programming language of your choice, write 95 programs, each of which outputs a different one of the 95 printable ASCII characters without that character occurring anywhere in the program.
For ...
- 88.6k
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votes
19
answers
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Write the whole of the holed using the unholed
The ASCII characters from decimal code 33 to 126 are:
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
...
- 88.6k
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votes
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All Your Base Are Belong To Us (Restricted)
Input must not be required, and output must read "All your base are belong to us".
Restrictions
No external resources.
Plus a minimum of two of the ...
- 7,463
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Output programming language name
Challenge:
In the programming language of your choice, take no input and output your programming language's name.
Fair enough, right?
Restrictions:
You can't use any character that is included in ...
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yes is 91 lines long
yes, from coreutils, is 91 lines long. Many of them are comments, but that is still WAY too long.
Edit from September 2019: the source file grew over the past five ...
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Significant Whitespace
We define whitespace to be any of the three characters, tab (0x09), newline (0x0A) or space (0x20).
For this challenge, you're to write two programs or functions in the same programming language, ...
- 195k
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Conway's Monster
This challenge is in honor of mathematician John Conway who passed away April 11, 2020 due to COVID-19. He was famous for coming up with the Game of Life cellular automaton and many other mathematical ...
- 88.6k
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votes
20
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Exit Code Golfing
Inspired by this default for IO.
The Task
Write a program that, given an input integer x between 0 and 255, crashes with exit code ...
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votes
52
answers
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Print all ASCII alphanumeric characters without using them
Challenge
Print the following characters:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890
The catch is that you may not use any one of them in ...
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Duct tape can fix Mother's Day
Based on the Duct tape can fix anything question, that was too broad, with very similar rules. Only this time the objective is very specific:
The challenge
Your mission is to make a program that ...
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Does it Lead or Follow?
In this challenge you are to write a program or function, that takes a string as input and outputs one of two possible values. We will call one of these values truthy and one falsy. They do not need ...
- 92.2k
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JSF**k with only 5 symbols?
This is not a challenge but a question, I figured it was on topic because of
Non-challenge questions that are related to solving programming puzzles or a particular type of challenge are also on ...
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Divide a number by 3 without using *, /, +, -, % operators [closed]
Quoting this question on SO (Spoiler alert!):
This question has been asked in an Oracle interview.
How would you divide a number by 3 without using *, /, +, -, %,
operators?
The number ...
- 3,579
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Depalindromize this string!
Given a palindrome generated according to this challenge, depalindromize it.
Test cases
...
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votes
5
answers
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Multiply with restricted operations
There's a 500 rep unofficial bounty for beating the current best answer.
Goal
Your goal is to multiply two numbers using only a very limited set of arithmetic operations and variable assignment.
...
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votes
86
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Hack into a Lottery
You've recently made an account on a dodgy gambling site, where for a fee of 25 dollars, they will pay you back a random amount between 0 and 50 dollars. After getting around 5 dollars twice, you ...
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A Chiral Puzzle
A shape is chiral if no amount of rotation can make it look like it's mirror image. In this puzzle we will be writing chiral computer programs.
For this puzzle we will think of a program as a ...
- 92.2k