shortest sudoku solver

bearophile sent me a link to this really cool program:

def r(a):i=a.find('0');~i or exit(a);[m
in[(i-j)%9*(i/9^j/9)*(i/27^j/27|i%9/3^j%9/3)or a[j]for
j in range(81)]or r(a[:i]+m+a[i+1:])for m in'%d'%5**18]
from sys import*;r(argv[1])

apparently it's a sudoku solver (couldn't you guess?). here's more information about it:
ShortestSudokuSolver

unfortunately, it mixes integers and strings ((i-j).. or a[j]) and arbitrary-size arithmetic (5**18), both of which are currently not supported by shed skin. the arbitrary-size arithmetic could be supported in this case, but I rewrote it for now. here's a version that works with shed skin CVS:

def r(a):
i=a.find('0')
if not ~i: print a; exit()
[m in [a[j] for j in range(81) if not (i-j)%9*(i/9^j/9)*(i/27^j/27|i%9/3^j%9/3)] or r(a[:i]+m+a[i+1:]) for m in '3814697265625']
from sys import *;r(argv[1])

it's 211 characters, versus the 178 of the one above, so that's not too bad :) and it becomes 18 times faster here.

basic pygame support

http://mark.dufour.googlepages.com/fysphun.png

this shows an interactive graphical program working with shed skin :-) the user can drag around points, and the connected 'bodies' move around realistically. to get this to work, I had to add basic pygame support (drawing points , lines, event handling). doing this was an interesting experience - I now feel it should be not too difficult to autogenerate bindings to many libraries, based on 1) a simple type model (manually written, see *_.py) and 2) the results of type inference. because my job requires me to implement/bridge some library calls, maybe I can be paid to work on this. hmm..

Shed Skin 0.0.11, give me money

I have just released Shed Skin 0.0.11. It contains several important fixes again (see test 162). Most notably, lambda support is greatly improved (especially in an OO setting), and casting of incomplete types is re-enabled (so you can do e.g. ()+(5,), a = [[1]]; a = [[]] and such).

In other news, I will probably be paid on a temporary basis this summer, to support a certain 1600-line program. Please let me know if you have a Python program/prototype that you'd like to have converted to C++, and I can probably tell you how much time this would take me.