Files
Landon Curt Noll 4ee4c731f7 convert markdown copyright TAB chars into SPACE chars
While not strictly necessary, replacing the two ASCII tab characters
in the markdown copyright comment makes it easier to detect problematic
TAB indentation within markdown files.

After this commit, only 90 markdown files have leading ASCII TAB
characters.  And again, while not strictly necessary, we can consider
running expand on those 90 markdown files to see what effect that
might have on the HTML files they produce.

Replace leading ASCII TAB characters with multiples of 8 ASCII SPACE
characters (the default action of the `expand(1)` tool) might have
an negative effect on some HTML formatting where **hack-a-round**
formatting was attempted to fix broken indentation caused by
problematic ASCII TAB characters.

Think of this as a baseline for evaluating leading
TAB characters within markdown files.

TODO: Consider either using `expand(1)` to replace leading ASCII
TAB characters with multiples of 8 ASCII SPACE characters AND/OR
modifying the appropriate `bin` tool to convert leading ASCII TAB
characters into multiples of 8 ASCII SPACE characters.
2024-06-22 22:15:25 -07:00

3.1 KiB

To build:

    make

To use:

    echo "some text" | ./goren

Try:

    ./try.sh

Judges' remarks:

In the words of René François Ghislain Magritte Magritte:

The Treachery of Images, image of a pipe, titled: Ceci n'est pas une pipe

One may ask the surrealist question:

    echo 'If | is just a representation of a pipe, then how can data stuff it?' | ./goren

However if one takes a firm stand and declares:

    echo '| is just a representation of a pipe because I say so! So stuff it!' | ./goren

something happens! Why?

Author's remarks:

This program was written in homage to Rene Magritte's picture "La trahison des images" (The Treachery of Images).

In order to show my unconditional admiration of this work, I avoided using conditions.

In this work, Magritte points out that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe. But what IS a pipe? This program tries to provide an answer.

Magritte's test for pipes is:

    The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could
    you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not?

Accordingly, this program only approves pipes which can be used for stuffing data.

One thing I tried to achieve is condition free programming. Many have noted that conditions make the code harder to read and understand. A good example would be: Brent Burley's winning 2004/burley entry.

That entry omits conditional statements such as if and while. His achievement in improving clarity by omitting conditions is impressive, but I think it can be taken further, in two ways.

First, conditional operators, such as ?:, && and ||, can be thrown away. Second, using setjmp(3) and longjmp(3), which are unfortunately not in common use, might make it difficult for a novice programmer to understand the code without referring to the man page.

By removing these, the code is 100% condition free, and every function runs its instructions in perfect order. Naturally, this makes the program flow trivial to understand. This can be verified by disassembling the compiled code and looking for conditional jumps (when compiled with gcc on x86, there are none).

Compatibility:

The program should compile with any C compiler, but was tested mostly with gcc on Linux.

It doesn't support 64 bits (due to integer-pointer casts, and a >>31). It does work on 64-bit Linux, because all functions are below 4GB.