Blog articles

  • 6th September 2021

Let the music play

char a;float b,c;main(d){for(;d>2e3*c?c=1,scanf(" %c%f",&a,&c),d=55-a%32*9/5,
b=d>9,d=d%13-a/32*12:1;a=2)++d<24?b*=89/84.:putchar(a=b*d);}

Good news for all International Obfuscated C Code Contest fans -- here's another winning piece from 2013 written by Yusuke Endoh, who is no stranger to the Contest. It is dubbed the Most Tweetable 1-Liner, because is small enough to fit in a tweet (137 characters only), yet can "tweet out a tune", that is, will play some music for your entertainment…

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  • 15th August 2018

Dots and Dashes

#!perl -p
y/.-/01/;s#\d+/?#substr'01etianmsurwdkgohvf,l.pjbxcyzq',31&oct b1.$&,1#ge

Perl is (in)famous for the ability to write programs that look like line noise, and today I will take apart this beautiful piece of code. Written by tybalt89, it can decode sequences of dots and dashes to Latin letters in just 73 characters of code…

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  • 13th March 2018

Anatomy of the heart

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

     my$f=           $[;my
   $ch=0;sub       l{length}
 sub r{join"",   reverse split
("",$_[$[])}sub ss{substr($_[0]
,$_[1],$_[2])}sub be{$_=$_[0];p
 (ss($_,$f,1));$f+=l()/2;$f%=l 
  ();$f++if$ch%2;$ch++}my$q=r
   ("\ntfgpfdfal,thg?bngbj".    
    "naxfcixz");$_=$q; $q=~
      tr/f[a-z]/ [l-za-k] 
        /;my@ever=1..&l
          ;my$mine=$q
            ;sub p{
             print
              @_;
               }
                         
       be $mine for @ever 

This heart-shaped program is written in the language of choice for producing unreadable and obfuscated code: Perl 5. It also serves an unusual purpose of a proposal…

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  • 1st March 2018

Have fun with Unix

main() { printf(&unix["\021%six\012\0"],(unix)["have"]+"fun"-0x60);}

Just one line of code, but lots of confusion.  What does this program do?…

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  • 18th February 2018

Some are more equal than others

"And to avoid the tedious repetition of these words: is equal to: I will set as I do often in work use, a pair of parallels, or Gemowe lines of one length, thus: =, because no 2 things, can be more equal." -- Robert Recorde, The Whetstone of Witte (1557)

public class Equality {
	public Equality() {
		Integer a1 = 100, a2 = 100;
		Integer b1 = 200, b2 = 200;
		if (a1 == a2) System.out.println("a1 == a2");
		if (b1 == b2) System.out.println("b1 == b2");
	}
	public static void main(String[] args) {new Equality(); }
}
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