The example commands in the judges' comments had some problems that gave
an error message when running them.
I have also figured out the apparent problem with macOS in the command
under the try section being:
echo "Quartz glyph jocks vend, fix, BMW." | compress | ./btoa | ./jaw
But it's not actually a problem. It uses perror() and under macOS with
errno == 0 it shows:
Undefined error: 0
whereas linux shows 'Success'. So it's not actually a problem with the
entry at all. In fact the condition that triggers that call is the same
in both linux and macOS.
I've updated bugs.md to note this and I also updated the README.md to
note it (and to refer to the bugs.md file for more details).
The thank you to me is because I missed it earlier on when I fixed the
scripts, simple though the fixes were.
1990 marked the "The Seventh International Obfuscated C Code Contest"
Look at the README.md file for the given winner for information on how to compile the winner and how to run the winning program. Look at the winning source and try to figure how it does what it does! You may then wish to look at the Author's comments for even more details.
This year, the Grand Prize won a standing ovation at USENIX.
The "Strangest abuse of the rules" award was given this year to stress the fact that starting in 1991, entries should be shell-specific.
This year was the first year that we accepted ANSI C entries. It was interesting to note that the ANSI C entries were as a whole less portable than the K&R C entries. We hope that in future contests people will enter more obfuscated and challenging ANSI C programs.
We would like to thank Barbara Frezza (loving wife of Larry Bassel) for her role as official chef of the contest. Her opinions regarding some of the contest entries were appreciated.
Rules and results were posted to comp.lang.c, comp.sources.unix, and alt.sources. They have been made available on a wide number of Usenet archive sites such as uunet.
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Copyright (c) 1990, Landon Curt Noll & Larry Bassel. 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 in writing from both Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel.