one-liner wars: n.

A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see write-only language and line noise). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine in one line of operators chosen from APL’s exceedingly hairy primitive set. A similar amusement was practiced among TECO hackers and is now popular among Perl aficionados.

Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this:

[TABLE]

Here’s a Perl program that prints primes:

[TABLE]

In the Perl world this game is sometimes called Perl Golf because the player with the fewest (key)strokes wins.