That's an interesting point, and certainly true in some areas, but having thought about it, I don't think it's fair.
The point of theexercise is to reduce to the smallest bit of program.. Your version should count the size of the interpeter as well, since it's necessary for execution.
Under that model, I could use a program of
1
I'll run this program with my new SwankyCool intrepreter [tm] which returns 42 if it sees a program comprising only "1"; Otherwise it calls perl to exec the rest of the file.
Now, in both cases, we're accepting that the entire OS is already there, but that was stated in his example. (ELF on Linux)
The point of theexercise is to reduce to the smallest bit of program.. Your version should count the size of the interpeter as well, since it's necessary for execution.
Under that model, I could use a program of
1
I'll run this program with my new SwankyCool intrepreter [tm] which returns 42 if it sees a program comprising only "1"; Otherwise it calls perl to exec the rest of the file.
Now, in both cases, we're accepting that the entire OS is already there, but that was stated in his example. (ELF on Linux)