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222

answers:

5

What is the most concise programming language? in case a criteria is needed for conciseness: on balance requires the least amount of characters to create any given program.

+12  A: 

APL, hands down.

Game of life in one line:

alt text

Earlz
this will be almost a page in LaTeX:D
Gabriel Ščerbák
That's cheating! When your character set is million characters (like it seems in this case) it's unfair to compete with languages constrained to alphanumeric and punctuation :)
Rafał Dowgird
The APL character set is a reasonable size. You just can't type it on a normal keyboard.
dmckee
+3  A: 

J, a descendant of APL.

Sample J implementation of quicksort (whitespace for clarity):

quicksort =: (($:@(<#[) , (=#[) , $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#)
David
The whitespace isn't helping...
Michael Myers
@mmyers: Maybe try squinting?
David
Are you sure that's not some kind of totem-pole smiley?
RD1
+5  A: 

The Whitespace programnming language only allows three characters (space, tab, and newline).

Andrew Hare
omg, that's priceless
digitaldreamer
Yeah, three characters are good, but two are getter:D Look at the Iota, Jot and Zot languages:http://esolangs.org/wiki/Jot
Gabriel Ščerbák
where do I find a unicode version of that language?
Stephan Eggermont
+4  A: 

Binary.

The zeroes and ones are then interpreted as x86 code.

There really isn't a good answer here

Pyrolistical
you should really see the Iota language:)
Gabriel Ščerbák
+3  A: 

I think it's APL (or one of its dialects). For example, to find all primes between 1 and R, this code works:

(~R∊R∘.×R)/R←1↓⍳R

However, to a daily use, I think any functional language (F#, for example) is very concise, since you only express what you want to do, not how.

Yassin