I don&#x27;t like the benchmark grid given.<p>It&#x27;s not hard to use fewer characters than Python if you add superfluous parentheses and don&#x27;t use any of its higher-level features. Rewriting the Python code to be roughly idiomatic shaves off a good 100 characters, even without noticeably changing the algorithm, and that&#x27;s even with adding some newlines and the indentation cost that entails.<p>And, IMHO, saving bytes by not having a #! or by using &quot;1&quot; over &quot;True&quot;, or even &quot;-&gt;&quot; over &quot;return, doesn&#x27;t impress me much.