1998 marked the "The Fourteenth International Obfuscated C Code Contest"
Copyright (c) Landon Curt Noll, Jeremy Horn, Peter Seebach
and Leonid A. Broukhis, 1999.
All Rights Reserved. Permission for personal, educational or non-profit
use is granted provided this this copyright and notice are included in its
entirety and remains unaltered. All other uses must receive prior permission
from the contest judges.
Standard IOCCC stuff
--------------------
The IOCCC has its own domain. The IOCCC has an official home page is now:
http://www.ioccc.org
Use make to compile entries. It is possible that on BSD or non-unix
systems the makefile needs to be changed. See the Makefile for details.
Look at the source and try to figure out what the programs do, and run
them with various inputs. If you want to, look at the hints files for
spoilers - this year we included most of the information included
by the submitters.
Read over the makefile for compile/build issues. Your system may
require certain changes (add or remove a library, add or remove a
#define).
Some ANSI C compilers are not quite as good as they should be. If
yours is lacking, you may need to compile using gcc instead of your
local compiler.
New Judges
----------
Larry Bassel is now a graduate student in number theory at UC San Diego.
Barbara Frezza also went to San Diego to enter into law school at the
same time. Her cooking in the role of official chef was sorely missed.
Both Larry and Barbara have taken important new steps in their lives.
We wish them the best.
Landon was unable to contact with Sriram Srinivasan at the start of
the 1998 IOCCC season. Having not heard from Sriram, Landon put out
a call for new IOCCC judges. A number of excellent people applied.
Landon selected Leonid A. Broukhis, a two time IOCCC winner, as a
co-judge. Landon and Leo together selected Jeremy Horn and Peter
Seebach. The four judges:
http://www.ioccc.org/judges.html
together worked thru-out the 1998 IOCCC season.
Remarks on some of the entries
------------------------------
This year, Jens Schweikhardt won 3 times ... AGAIN! He is the only
person who was able to do this, let alone do it in two contests
in a row. Bas de Bakker and David Lowe won twice this year as well.
As we state in the guidelines, the names of the winners are as much
news to us as they are to you because we keep authorship separate from
rest of the entry. Some people have it, we guess!
There were a few very good entries that might have won if it were not
for the fact that they didn't work. If you didn't win, but think you
had a chance: test your program, fix it and submit it next year!
This year we awarded some outstanding entries. We recommend that you
look at all of the winners. The list of winners is a bit too long to
say something about every winner. On the other hand a partial mention
of a few is in order:
+ Audiences were very impressed with the Best of Show entry.
+ The judges were amused that for the first time we received an entry
that caused gcc to give the assembler bad input in some cases.
+ The poot entries got a good laugh from the Usenix IOCCC BOF crowd.
+ Those with Functional Programming knowledge as well as those
impressed with CPP code expansion liked the entry that translated
lambda expressions into combinator expressions.
+ Logic minded folks will get somewhat twisted up while following the
flow of the Best Flow Control entry.
+ Those who know the PostScript language will be ``bemused'' by
the Best Encapsulation entry.
There were some outstanding entries that did not win. Unfortunately
some very good entries lost because they:
+ depended too much on non-portable side effects in expressions;
+ depended too much on a particular byte order;
+ required the use of a special script, data file or pseudo-machine
language that was not supplied with the entry.
We hope the authors of some of those entries will fix and re-submit
them for the next IOCCC.
There was no 1997 contest
-------------------------
So what happened to 1997? There was no summer USENIX Technical
Conference. The Technical Conference was held Jun 15-19, 1998 instead
... 18 months later than the 1996 summer USENIX Technical Conference.
In addition we had to select some new IOCCC judges. As a result IOCCC
skipped over 1997.
Final Comments
--------------
Please send us comments and suggestions what we have expressed above.
Also include anything else that you would like to see in future contests.
Send such email to:
questions@ioccc.org
If you use, distribute or publish these entries in some way, please drop
us a line. We enjoy seeing who, where and how the contest is used.
If you have problems with any of the entries, AND YOU HAVE A FIX, please
EMail the fix (patch file or the entire changed file) to the above address.
The next IOCCC is planned to start towards the end of 1999. Watch:
http://www.ioccc.org
for news of the next contest.
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