Skip to main content

Timeline for Shortest Error Message

Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0

19 events
when toggle format what by license comment
Sep 7 at 17:59 comment added Toby Speight Interestingly, GNU ed emits the message to standard ouptut stream, not the error stream. But does exit with status 1. So it seems it's not quite sure whether it's an error or not.
Jun 5, 2021 at 4:12 comment added Anders Kaseorg @Makonede The 0\n only appears when providing a 0-byte input file as an argument to ed. The TIO wrapper does this, but one doesn’t need to do so in general. If one does, the 0\n is not part of an error message: it appears before any code is read, and indicates the size of the input file.
Jun 4, 2021 at 20:26 comment added Makonede This outputs 0\n?\n to STDERR, which is longer than the source code. This can be fixed at no cost, however, by using -s.
Jul 4, 2018 at 14:13 history undeleted Dennis
Jul 4, 2018 at 14:12 comment added Dennis As pointed out in a flag, the error is fatal if the code isn't read from a terminal. Try it online!
Feb 20, 2018 at 8:31 history deleted Martin Ender via Vote
Feb 20, 2018 at 8:31 comment added Martin Ender If the error isn't fatal as Mark points out, I'm afraid this answer is invalid. Please edit the answer if there's an ed implementation where the error actually terminates the program, and flag it for moderator attention so that it can be undeleted.
Dec 2, 2017 at 19:45 vote accept user72528
Jul 27, 2017 at 11:50 comment added Mark Plotnick Very clever, but '?' isn't fatal.
Jul 26, 2017 at 10:52 comment added Toby Speight This answer was exactly my first thought on reading the question. Ed is justly famed for its succinct error messages.
Jul 25, 2017 at 7:48 comment added Atmahadli well, you got my upvote :D
Jul 22, 2017 at 17:26 history edited Taylor Raine CC BY-SA 3.0
added 48 characters in body
Jul 22, 2017 at 1:20 history edited Anders Kaseorg CC BY-SA 3.0
added 250 characters in body; added 177 characters in body
Jul 22, 2017 at 0:57 comment added Anders Kaseorg @StepHen Yes, it can do addition and primality testing in unary via the usual regex-with-backreferences trick.
Jul 21, 2017 at 22:34 comment added Stephen Can ed do addition and primality testing? Or is that not required for this type of challenge?
Jul 21, 2017 at 20:24 comment added Adalynn Not entirely, if for some reason the newline alone counts as an error, or if there exists an error that is one character long and does not have a trailing new line, then it's possible.
Jul 21, 2017 at 20:21 comment added totallyhuman Actually, this is impossible to beat. :P
Jul 21, 2017 at 20:09 history edited Anders Kaseorg CC BY-SA 3.0
added 45 characters in body
Jul 21, 2017 at 20:06 history answered Anders Kaseorg CC BY-SA 3.0