Tony Finch – blog
The International Obfuscated C Code Contest has a newly revamped web site, and the Judges have announced the 28th contest, to coincide with its 40th anniversary. (Or 41st?)
The Judges have also updated the archive of past winners so that as many of them as possible work on modern systems. Accordingly, I took a look at my 1998 winner to see how much damage time hath wrought.
It’s part of coercing the C compiler into compiling OFL, an obfuscated functional language. OFL has keywords l and b, short for let and be, so for example the function for constructing a pair is defined as
(There’s a joke in the README that the OFL compiler has one optimization, function inlining (which is actually implemented by cpp macro expansion) but in fact inlining harms the performance of OFL.)
The smaller the OFL interpreter, the more space there is for the program written in OFL. In the 1998 IOCCC rules, #define cost 7 characters, whereas l cost only one. I think the modern rules don’t count C or cpp keywords so there’s less reason to use this stupid trick to save space.
