16th IOCCC Winners Announced

chongo writes: "The winners of the 16th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) have been selected. The judges are in the process of notifying the winners by EMail. We expect to release the source code around mid April 2002 after the winners have had a chance to review our writeup of their entries."

Comments

The list of who won

[chongo]

An updated list of who won the 16th IOCCC may be found at:

http://www.ioccc.org/whowon.html

We have already had one anonymous winner request to become non-anonymous.

What was the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

So... somebody won a contest. The percentage of Slashdot readers who might actually *know* a winner are probably miniscule. The character of the entries is unknown. There's no source code yet. In fact, to other than the 16 people who won, the losers, and their close personal friends... what's the friggin point of posting this to slashdot NOW? And they were all notified in e-mail anyway.

Try again when there's something to *see*.

Re:Obfuscated code contests?

[Jesse Duke]

You're missing the point. From the IOCCC website :

To write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program under the rules below.

To show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way.

To stress C compilers with unusual code.

To illustrate some of the subtleties of the C language.

To provide a safe forum for poor C code. :-)

If you use gcc, you probably have benefited from fixes of bugs those programs have helped uncover.

It has been done

[EggplantMan]

... without just appearing to be in another language, but actually being so. Take a look here . Genius or travesty?

Re:Here's an idea for a contest

[mcc]

You may be interested in a type of program called a "polyglot"-- a program which is simultaneously valid, and preferably does the same thing, in more than one language simultaneously. Several previous IOCCC winners have been polyglots. (You maybe should look in particular at the one entry-- i'm *pretty* sure this was last year-- for a program that #DEFINED a bunch of english words as chunks of C that did the same thing the english words did, and then wrote a short *compilable* program in totally readable pseudocode.. with the gimmick being that the program actually did something wholly other than what the pseudocode said it did! Even if you know this coming in, it still is near impossible even on several readings to figure out how exactly it works out. It was rather cute.)

Anyway, a few polyglot-related links:

• here is the only Polyglot archive anywhere on the internet that i am aware of. Please, please read this link. It's amazing. My favorite is i think the quine (!!) which is simultaneously valid in C and Scheme. (It exploits the fact that ; is a comment operator in scheme, and is a really neat little read..)
• Here is the only polyglot i'm aware of which is not in the above archive.
• Here's a short little writeup on polyglots i did for everything2.com. It isn't that interesting.

With the crazy-ass language redefinition capabilities in perl 6, i think we can expect to see a resurgence in some very odd polyglots very soon..

Grrr.. mean, mean slashdot editors.. telling us the IOCCC winners were announced just so we can wait in suspense for a full month to see the entries.. bleh. I love the IOCCC..

Silly

[The Sojourner]

If you use gcc, you probably have benefited from fixes of bugs those programs have helped uncover.

When I say I'm not much of a programmer, I mean that I'm not a programmer at all :-) I don't use gcc, but if this contest has helped to improve it, then maybe I was wrong about it. Thanks for pointing that out to me!

Re:winning entry

[n8twj]

that is a teaser..it says not an offical entry

Look out of your good eye next time

Re:Here's an idea for a contest

[mcc]

The polyglot quines were on the polyglot page i linked, not the quine page i linked (both of which were on nyx.net..). The quine page was linked in case a given reader didn't know what a quine was. The C/LISP hybrid quine was the 10th entry on the polyglot page. It was this one.

Sorry if i was unclear.