Comments on The Palindrome Challenge
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The Palindrome Challenge
Your task is to write a program, which is palindromic. This means, that you can reverse it's source code and will get the exact same source code.
I don't care, what your program does, as long as it
- does something visible to the user (like outputting something or creating a file)
- doesn't do anything harmful.
Your program must consist of at least one character/byte (whatever your language uses). If your chosen language defaults to outputting every character, unless certain "control sequences" are given (such as PHP or HTML for example), your program must have at least one of those sequences if you want to make use of that feature, otherwise you can assume that the correct control sequences have been put around your source code.
Scoring
Take B the number of bytes and U the number of bytes that will be "used" in one execution of your program (excluding, for example, unreachable branches or comments). Now your score is:
$$\frac{U^2}{B}$$
The program with the highest score in any language wins. This scoring system should favor longer programs while penalizing programs with a lot of "unexecutable stuff" in between. Ideally, every character would be part of the executed code.
What do you think of this challenge suggestion? Do you think the scoring criterion is good for this challenge?
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