Landon Curt Noll
f64f244ba6
The largest change was due to modifying `ioccc.css` that resulted in all year and entry tarballs being modified. Ran `make update` to perform the above.
To build:
make
To use:
./prog < file > file.Z
Try:
./try.sh
Judges' remarks:
Finally, IOCCC now has its own text compression program, and it is short enough to qualify for the Best Short Program award! That said, can you compress it down to a one-liner, still producing files in the UNIX compress format, albeit sacrificing the compression ratio?
Can you explain why the /dev/zero file compresses identically by the entry and
the standard compress(1) tool (see
try.sh), but the text file
compresses differently? The judges know. :)
Author's remarks:
A tiny "compress" tool:
Usage:
./prog < input.txt > input.txt.Z
Example:
./prog < guidelines.txt > guidelines.txt.Z
Check for correctness:
zcat guidelines.txt.Z > guidelines2.txt
diff -s guidelines.txt guidelines2.txt
Of course you can also use 2015/mills2 instead of
zcat to verify the output file. The achieved compression ratio roughly matches
that of the classic Unix compress(1) tool. And the source code is very
compressed, too: It has exactly the same size as the paragraph you are reading
right now. And exactly the same shape. Nevertheless, it is portable C99 code
that runs on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. It compiles without warnings on both
GCC and Clang even with -Wextra and -Weverything.
2023 note: the above paragraph might not be true as far as number of bytes goes.