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World's Shortest P2P App: 15 Lines
soren.harward writes "The New Scientist has an article about TinyP2P, the world's smallest P2P app. It's 15 lines of Python code brought to us by Edward Felten, CS Professor at Princeton and outspoken supporter of the digital rights the Slashdot community holds so dear. He wrote the program as a proof-of-concept that P2P apps are really easy to write, don't have to be complicated, and thus banning them (a la the INDUCE Act) is pointless and silly."
Molestar uses a very loose defintion of "lines". A line in perl is ussually where the ; is, which in readable code should be at the end of the actual line. I counted 5 ;'s in the first line of Molestar with a briefscan. A brief estimation would tell us Molestar is more like 30 actuall lines. (I don't see why Molestar doesn't just claim to be one line as all of this code, could work just fine in 1 "line" as they define.)
I've never used Python before, but I would imagine by looking at the code to TinyP2P that python's lines truely end at the end of the line. So as far as line count is concerned TinyP2P is around half the size as Molestar.
Machine language, the bytecode form of assembly language that microprocessors interpret, doesn't really have "lines" either. The point isn't that MoleSter is 6 lines as much as it is 466 bytes, and programming golf rules state that a lower score in bytes is better.