Multi-language golf contest!

[Zeroth]

This is a very simple contest I decided to run. I want to encourage skill and discussion in various programming languages. Anyway, the contest is: Write code, in one of the language categories solving one of the tasks given, in as few characters as possible. I will not be comparing languages against each; Each entry will only be compared against entries in the same language.

Language categories:

• Java
  
• C
  
• C++
  
• Turing
  
• Python
  
• Ruby
  

I've only thought up one task, but if you guys have any suggestions, I'll be glad to hear them.
The first task is: make a compact code entry character counter. It must be able to ignore comments in any of the entries, count newlines and carriage returns. Carriage returns should count as one character. Oh, and don't forget to skip over characters in a string. Oh, and \t characters count as one character.

Of course, the entries should work.

What do you win? Why, prestige of course. I'll also donate a bunch of bits... except I don't have many, lol. Probably learn stuff, and become a better programmer.

Here is my "naive" entry, which I believe works 100%. If your entry does not give the same result, it is disqualified. And for reference, using it on itself, gives a result of 910 characters.

[rizzix]

Mods can sponsor bits.

However, I'm curious, why limit it to only those languages?

[Zeroth]

Well, because I knew the comment delimiting characters in those languages? Remember, the task of the compact character counter includes skipping over comments. If you have a language you'd like to try, suggest it.

[rizzix]

Perl, Haskell, Scala, O'Caml, Common Lisp, to name a few.

[Zeroth]

Umm, what are the comment delimiters for those languages?

[rizzix]

For Scala its the same as Java.
For Perl, its the same as Python, Ruby, etc.
For Haskell: --
For Lisp: ;

For O'Caml, well I don't know.


(I'm assuming by comments we're talking about line-comments only)

[gitoxa]

Quote:

which I believe works 100%. If your entry does not give the same result, it is disqualified

There's something wrong with those two sentences.
Not bashing your program at all; just your logic.

[Zeroth]

Well, its assumed if anyone finds a bug in my code, they'll point it out. You're disqualified. (Not really, just kidding)

[gitoxa]

Haha, true enough. On to making my own, though. I'll probably do turing first, just to help me get my thoughts out easily with a familiar language, then give another one a try. Perhaps python, since I already have something to compare with after.

Oh, and are we supposed to somewhat follow standard coding conventions? Or are we just going for the lowest amount of characters... heh.

One other quick question, I don't completely understand what you mean about the strings. Is an entire string being counted as 1, are you ignoring the quotes, or does python do something weird with quotes when trying to get input?

yet another edit:
I noticed your program counts the line feeds at the end of comments as a character, for example, the following results 7.

code:

Hello #Hi #Goodbye

is that on purpose?


And I may come up with some other questions shortly. I ran my program on your code and got a different number. ...A very different number.

[Zeroth]

That is on purpose. Because \n still counts as a character, that IS read by compilers/interpreters. Sometimes it has meaning, sometimes it doesn't. Comments however, are not read by compilers/interpreters. Good questions.

[Zeroth]

Don't forget to handle strings!

[gitoxa]

after a lengthy google search, o'caml's comment is
(* Comments here *)

[Zeroth]

Okay, Gitoxa has his entries in:
For the languages I suggested, in Turing, his code comes in at 409 characters.
For all the languages, in Turing, his code comes in at 548 characters. Good job Gitoxa!

[Saad]

Will there be nested quotes, like "Foo \" nested Foobar \" Bar" ?

Edit: I also see your code supports pything, turing and ruby, but from the main post I am confused about what language (s) are supposed to be supported by our code.

[Zeroth]

The main qualities are the languages I stated in my main post. You can also support the languages rizzix suggested as well, for a separate category.