Ligerleon89

It could be worse - you could be a judge for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, where not only do people write purposely stupefying code (like figuring out the area of a circle by literally calculating the area of a circle in the code itself) but will get awards like "Worst Abuse of the Rules" (considered a high honor, especially if the judges change the rules).

An example of that: Someone wrote "The world's smallest self-replicating C Program." The sourcecode file is 100% empty. When compiled, it made a zero-byte program, that successfully ran and displayed absolutely nothing - thus fulfilling exactly what it said it would do.

As the judges said:

While strictly speaking, smr.c is not a valid C program, it is not an invalid C program either! Some C compilers will compile an empty file into a program that does nothing. But even if your compiler can't, the build instructions supplied with this entry will produce an executable file. On most systems, the stdout from the executable will exactly match original source.

They changed the rules so the minimum compiled size had to be at least one byte.

^ Don't see how it relates, but it's a nice contest to check out. It wasn't really about "stupefying" code, but more "obfuscating" - making it difficult to read, so it's hard to tell what program does before running. Like here's BASIC compiler/interpreter:

Code

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#define Q r=R[*p++-'0'];while(
#define B ;break;case
char*s="Qjou!s\\311^-g\\311^-n\\311^-c\\::^-q-ma%mO1JBHm%BQ-aP1J[O1HB%[Q<nbj\
o)*|gps)<<*txjudi)m*|aQdbtf!::::;sfuvso<aQefgbvmu;aQ<m,,a%CQ<csfbla%bQ<aN2!Q\
\ndbtf!aP2Q;m>aP2Q<a%!D12J!JGJHJOJQJFJSJJJMHS%HD12D12N3!N4\nJUJT%UQm>aP4HC%T\
Qs\\q,,^>m,2<m>aP4HC%SD12N1\nJNQm>s\\..q^aHC%NHb%GN1!D32P3%RN1UP1D12JPQUaP1H\
R%PN4\nQ<g\\(aP3Q(^>aP2Q,2<n\\(aP3Q(^>aP4Hb%OD12D12N2!N3\nJVP3Q,,<jg)aP3Q=>n\
\\(aP3Q(^*m>g\\(aP3Q(^<fmtf!m,,aHC%QN1!N1\nJ#Qqsjoug)#&e]o#-aP1Q*aHb%#Qqvut)\
aP1Q*aHb%FN1\nQm>::::aHC%VP3Q>bupj)hfut)c**aHb%JD12JON1!Qjg)a%LN1UP1D12JIQUa\
P1HL%IQ*m>aN2!N2\nP2Q<fmtf!m,,aHC%MN1!N2>P2Q>aN2\nP2Hbdd!b/d";k;char R[4][99]
;main(c,v)char**v;{char*p,*r,*q;for(q=s;*q;q++)*q>' '&&(*q)--;{FILE*i=fopen(v
[1],"r"),*o=fopen(q-3,"w");for(p=s;;p++)switch(*p++){B'M':Q(k=fgetc(i))!=EOF
&&k!=*p)*r++=k;if(k==EOF){fputs("}}\n",o);fclose(o);return system(q-6);}*r=0
B'P':while(*p!='`')fputc(*p++,o)B'O':Q*r)fputc(*r++,o);p--B'C':k=0;Q k<*p-'0'
)(*r++=fgetc(i),k++);*r=0 B'I':k= *p;if(**R==k)goto G B'G':k= *p;G:p=s;while(
*p!='$'||p[1]!= k)p++;p++B'N':R[*p-'0'][0]++;}}}

As of abuses of the rules, there was once a contest between students to make a fastest program to do some actions with a file (I don't remember what actions, but let's say it's some matrix calculations).
Third place was about 9 seconds time - a guy did an optimized algorithm of that calculation.
Second place was about 1 second - since programs were ran on a same machine and submissions were unlimited, a guy first sent a program that made result and saved it to hard disk there, and then sent a program that copied the file.
First place was... -3 seconds, the guy altered unix system clock after finishing the task.
Contest was annulled.... for some reason

As for your problem, with VS(C++) you won't need to build separate files into object data then link them, it's done for you. Though surely enough it also has its bugs and glitches, they're not so vital (and it's under development). Con would be that it's not cross-platform. (it's MS, what would you expect)

Well, not all of them are obfuscated. Some do little tricks. There's a flight simulator, where the dev took the painstaking time to make the code into the shape of an airplane.

And I did mention the "calculating a circle by the size of a circle in the code":

Code:

#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--; int F=00,OO=00;main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO()
 {
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         _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ 
            _-_-_-_
 }

So yeah... there's some real winners in there.

The original contest was contest of "obfuscation" (See its name - IOCCC). Later, of course, they became bored with just this - so they started trying to do more fun things, like shaping or in other ways fucking with preprocessor.
Also, the code you just pasted is obfuscated too - it's not obvious what program does before you launch it/spend load of time thinking. (Same would go for the flight simulator)

Originally Posted by Enhance

The original contest was contest of "obfuscation" (See its name - IOCCC). Later, of course, they became bored with just this - so they started trying to do more fun things, like shaping or in other ways fucking with preprocessor.
Also, the code you just pasted is obfuscated too - it's not obvious what program does before you launch it/spend load of time thinking. (Same would go for the flight simulator)

It's obfuscated, yes, but the stupefying part comes from how it calculates the circle. That sort of "Why would you ever do this?!" thing.

Well i finished my program finally, turns out that my compiler on my laptop was incorrectly installed, and I left just about two errors that I fixed easily. Program works like a charm.