Maybe I should disqualify Bryce for cheating as he did post a potential solution I'll make sure that the next round will have an unmanageably long file name Also, the rules already take care of this via
Quote:
The UDF should be self-contained (except for any I/O mentioned in the challenge). In particular, you may not do things like fetching extra data from a remote site or file.
And I see that Jooel is his usual self and raises to the challenge. BTW, I'll keep the VALs in place because an intrinsic conversion of a NULL to a zero would happen anyway when comparing the function result against the expected result. I also do not have the zero as a test case, thus from an test suite eval point of view, there's no damage done.
Regarding the rumor of changing the rules in mid-race, I was informed by one of the participants that the name of the function penalizes certain potential approaches. As it is not my intention, I will change the name of the function that is being called to a one-character name of A(). While technically this is not a rule-change, I do realize that it can potentially affect the outcome. I will therefore recognize two first-round winners, one for the tightest code before the function name change, thus anything posted before this one, and a second one, if necessary, for the tightest code after the function name change. I will also notify all participants via PM of this change.
I'll make sure that the next round will have an unmanageably long file name 
Also, the rules already take care of this via 
