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Crap, the site ate the square brackets (and some more again). Here's a repost using <> instead of square brackets. Feel free to delete the previous post.
To be honest I find the criteria a little vague. What language should we use? How much of the standard libraries can we use? If you're not too hung up on the solution being a stand-alone program that understands your calling syntax, I have a pretty short Matlab solution. It consists of two parts: loading the file and computing the maximum:
n=load('numbers.txt'); % loading: 22 characters
max(<sum(n),sum(n')>) % computing + printing back to console: 21 charactersThat's 43 characters if I omit excess whitespace. If you would allow me to rename the file to something like 'n.txt', I could do this:
load n.txt; % 11 characters
Allowing me to rename it to 'n.mat' would allow me to omit 4 more characters:
load n; % 7 characters
If I'm allowed to assume that the number of columns is always equal to the number of rows, the second part can also be shortened:
max(sum(<n n'>)) % 16 characters
So depending on the rules, I either have no valid solution, or a solution of between 43 and 23 characters. Here is the whole shortest solution:
load n;max(sum(<n n'>))
The square brackets thing is really a pain for programming languages isn't it. That's the mediawiki markup — I'd love to lose it really now and switch to something like tinymce. Wonder when I'll have time?