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000014_icon-group-sender _Sat Apr 24 14:27:49 1993.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Sun, 25 Apr 1993 18:22:14 MST
Date: 24 Apr 93 14:27:49 GMT
From: agate!howland.reston.ans.net!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!ellis!goer@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Organization: University of Chicago
Subject: Re: Lets Make Icon Popular. Lets hold a contest.
Message-Id: <1993Apr24.142749.24979@midway.uchicago.edu>
References: <1raf77$bti@access.digex.net>
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
In article <1raf77$bti@access.digex.net> prb@access.digex.com (Pat) writes:
>
>Every year at Usenix, they hold the IOCCC that is the International
>Obfuscated C coding Contest. The rules are simple. No more then
>1 page of source code. Must do soemthing non-trivial. Winner
>is the most amazing bit of code.
>
>what do you all think?
Sounds like a neat idea. Of course, the reason the obfuscated C contest
is such a hit is because it plays on a "feature" of C, namely sparse syn-
tax and no seat belts. You can subscript past the end of an array, create
pointers to pointers to nothing in particular. You can declare variables
and assign a value to them whose storage has a shorter lifetime than the
variable. You can do incredibly stupid and/or cryptic things in C. What's
funny is when somebody makes something that *looks* incredibly stupid or
cryptic actually work.
In Icon, cryptic-ness would have to dwell more, I'd think, on unexpected
or complex side-effects from coexpressions or generators. There is a fine
line, at times, between "expressiveness" and "power" and "obfuscation."
--
-Richard L. Goerwitz goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
goer@midway.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer