This is also a terrible idea because of the mindless focus on removing characters that it encourages.

It's not obvious from my node or even from the things I link, but elsewhere it's clear that the focus is not on characters.

The most meaningful test of the length of a program is not lines or characters but the size of the codetree-- the tree you'd need to represent the source. The Arc example has a codetree of 23 nodes: 15 leaves/tokens + 8 interior nodes.