> For those who enjoy and/or learn from this kind of thing (I do both),
> here's another minimalizing exercise:
> 
> Write a program which, given a positive integer argument n, prints a
> diamond pattern (see below) whose widest line is n characters wide.
> 
> I got this down to a fit 54 bytes in Perl
> I haven't tried it in Ruby yet
> 
> David

I couldn't resist this interesting puzzle!  Here is a 66-character
Ruby solution I came up with:

a=[s='#'*w=$*[0].to_i];(w/2).times{a=[s=' '+s[0..-3]]+a<<s};puts a

I'd like to see if anyone can trim this further....

- Jim