I'd be interested to see Haskell and J kick every other language's butts. I'd actually use Haskell, if given the option.

I asked for Scheme, but if you want Haskell pester carldr on IRC

I asked for Scheme, but if you want Haskell pester carldr on IRC

i will learn any language, especially if it turns out be good for codegolf. however, i would prefer to learn scheme than haskell, because i know that many gnu projects use scheme, whereas i am not aware of any major non-academic projects using haskell. i might be wrong.

previously on irc i have suggested postscript. i think it is more useful than forth and would be interesting because it is postfix.

i slightly prefer the scheme suggestion to postscript, however, because i suspect that scheme would be more popular. (neither scheme nor postscript are likely to be very popular, or to win any challenges overall, but there are challenges that they will be relatively good at.)

i am not aware of any major non-academic projects using haskell. i might be wrong.

Pugs (an implementation of Perl6) is probably the best known non-academic project that uses Haskell.

Darcs, a version control system, is another.

Plus, it'd be a really interesting codegolf language. Good? Not sure -- I'm pretty new to it. You know, it can do things like map (**2) [1..5], but it might get tripped up in all that input/output handling. Monads.

I'd like to see how io (http://www.iolanguage.com/) or Lua (http://www.lua.org/) stack up against ruby, and python.
--Tstrokes

Lua is nice but it would not work well because the base language is so sparse, all the functionality comes from the libraries.

some of these text-heavy challenges made me remember fondly the good old days when I was doing a lot of AWK scripting. That would be a good golf language.

I second the suggestions of Scheme and Haskell and Io. (Lua would be fine too, though I agree about the library issue.)

Add Java please! With the sun jdk if possible.

I third the suggestion of Haskell.

I heard about Code Golf on the Squeak developer list. Someone thought we could submit Smalltalk code here. I found out he was wrong. Any possibility of adding Smalltalk? From what I understand GNU Smalltalk has the best scripting support right now, of the different implementations. I've heard there's a way to run scripts through Squeak (another open implementation of Smalltalk), but I have no idea how well that would work on here.

Lua works well enough. I have a solution to the Joy of ASCII challenge in it, but no way to submit it. Please add Lua to the list!

I don't think there'll be any compiled languages in a close future. (Haskell and Java are two which I'm thinking of.)

Then again I'm in no way any authority, but if I understood the workings correctly, that'd be too tough to implement in a sane way.

Haskell can be interpreted. The runhaskell script will do what it says. While not as concise as perl, here's an example of the Roman numerals script in Haskell (135 characters):

e(c:j)n m f v|v==c=n
|1<2=e j(n*m)f m v
q x(y,l)|x<l=(y-x,l)
|1<2=(x+y,x)
main=getLine>>=return.fst.foldr q(0,0).map(e"IVXLCDM"1 5 2)

Note: it looks like this forum strips leading spaces even in code blocks. There is a space in front of the second and fourth lines (this is required).

Notice that shinh's golf site (under construction) supports 52 languages, including Haskell, Java and probably all the others asked for.

Haskell certainly will be a great option

Could we get perl 5.10 please? Being able to use ~~ would be very useful... ;-)

If Scheme (or any of the other major Lisp variants) was one of the featured languages on codegolf.com, it would certainly be a great incentive and motivation for learning Lisp.

But I guess that may be said about any language...

Javascript.

Now that would be awesome :D

I'd like to put in a vote for Euphoria. It's open source now. There are ports for Windows, DOS, Linux and FreeBSD.

--boost

Dare I suggest VBScript?

I would like to ask you to include bash and awk into the competence.

I've already solved "Saving Time" in bash:

p(){ printf $@;};e(){ echo $@;};t(){ [ $h = $1 ]&&{ [ $m = $1 ]&&e x||e h;}||{ [ $m = $1 ]&&e m||e o;};};x(){ e `t $((12-$1))` `t $1`;};a(){ p %9s\\n `t $1`;};b(){ p %5s%8s\\n `x $1`;};c(){ p %2s%14s\\n `x $1`;};d(){ p %s%16s\\n `x $1`;};read i;h=$((10#${i%:*}%12));m=$((10#${i#*:}/5));a 0;b 1;e;c 2;e;d 3;e;c 4;e;b 5;a 6

322 chars.

I vote for, in the following order:
- C
- D
- C++
- shell scripting (both POSIX and bash)
- JavaScript
- REBOL/ORCA
- FreeBASIC
- awk
- Tcl
- bc
- COBOL
- Forth
- Clipper
- Eiffel
- Fortran
- LOLCODE
- Inform7
- V
- Modula-2
- Boo
- Joy
- Lisp

I really, really want you to add C. Can has? Please? :D

The guy suggesting the interactive-fiction authoring language Inform7 can't be serious: it's main strength is being a natural English language subset and that means being verbose. Inform 6 or TADS, who knows?

In any way, verbose languages like that are naturally at disadvantage here. Lisp and Scheme are like that, specially as parentheses don't count out as whitespace and Scheme is very barebones as a language: barely more than function definition and application with very little builtins. My personal solutions in plain Scheme so far can't match at all the regular 30 bytes in Perl solutions without features like while(<>) or chop, builtin iterators etc. Easy to code, but not builtin. Code is also so short that macros are of no use.

In other words, no point getting Scheme to compete in a competition of whose language offers the most builtins.

hi, I just started here,
I've used Factor as the programming language of choice.

Can you support it in the scoring? it is quite elegant and the solutions are quite clear.