Landon Curt Noll
f615bba21e
The commit 00ae59cd47 had a
mistake that introduces changes to Makefiles for 1996 thru 2020
that should not have been included.
This change reverses these intermediate changes until
the given year's Makefiles are ready.
Best sparkling utility
J. David Lowe
434 Tenney Drive
Rogue River, OR
97537
j.david.lowe@gmail.com
http://www.pootpoot.net/
Judges' comments:
To build:
make dlowe
To run:
./dlowe [numbers...]
Try:
./dlowe 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
./dlowe 16 32 64 128
echo sparkline of file sizes: `wc -c * | awk '{print $1}' | xargs ./dlowe`
./dlowe 0
Selected Judges Remarks:
We liked how this entry used Unicode, specifically UTF-8, in a somewhat obfuscated way.
Also, why doesn't it crash, and produces a correct output when called with one argument or when all arguments are equal?
For extra fun, compile and run
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf("%d %d %d\n", (int)(-1.0/0.0), (int)(0.0/0.0), (int)(1.0/0.0));
}
with gcc and clang.
With GCC (4.7.2), we get
-2147483648 -2147483648 -2147483648
and with clang (3.3), we get
-2147483648 0 2147483647
Which one is correct? :)
Author's comments:
sparkl
A tiny implementation of command-line 'sparkline' data visualization.
Synopsis
$ sparkl 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
▁▂▃▄▅▆▇▉
$ echo sparkline of file lengths: `wc -c * | awk '{print $1}' | xargs sparkl`
sparkline of file sizes: ▁▁▁▃▃▂▁▂▁▁▉
Description
This is a handy little tool for visualizing numeric series from the command-line, using 'sparklines'. Pass it a numeric series as arguments, and sparkl will display a sparkline graph, which you can use to very quickly get a sense of the shape of your data.
Limitations
- Crashes with 0 arguments. It'd be trivial to fix, but adds a few bytes to the code.
- Produces bogus graphs when given > about 5000 arguments.
- Only works if your terminal is utf-8 and your font supports the 8 glyphs used.
- Produces a few harmless compiler warnings.
Obfuscation
The code is very terse. I was torn between submitting this version, and a one-line version compressed using a couple more -D flags.
Hand-rolled utf-8 sequence, magic numbers (what's that 7 for?), meaningless variable names, reused variables, and so on.
Acknowledgements
Edward Tufte invented sparklines (among other things.) Brilliant.
Zach Holman's 'spark' utility was absolutely an inspiration.
As I was writing up this description, I discovered I'm not the first person to write an obfuscated C sparkline utility! Vicent Martí created this one years (!) ago. (My implementation is completely independent.)