Best Small Program

NATORI Shin Univ. of Tokyo Rigakubu 7-goukan 311 Hongou 7-3-1, Bunkyou-ku, Tokyo Japan

To build:

make

Cody Boone Ferguson fixed this for modern compilers. Depending on the compiler it would either segfault when run or not compile at all (gcc and clang respectively). Thank you Cody for your assistance!

To run:

./natori

Try:

echo "Do or do not. There is no try."

Alternate code:

The author noted that those in the southern hemisphere might want to change acos(l/2) into acos(-l/2). Cody went ahead and made an alt version to do this.

To run:

make alt

Use natori.alt as you would natori.

Judges' remarks:

Here is a nice compact program that changes with the phase of the moon. Can you figure out how it does it?

The ANSI-C committee, among their multiple misdeeds, broke perfectly fun C programs by making it intractable for them to declare their own non-traditional prototype for main(). We have had uglify this program in order to try and prevent C compilers form failing to compile due to the unusual arg types of the main() function.

Author's remarks:

This program outputs a rough image of the moon in its current phase. The main obfuscation of this entry is its complicated double recursion (without any loop or conditional statement).

People living in the southern hemisphere may want to change acos(l/2) into acos(-l/2).

Copyright and CC BY-SA 4.0 License:

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For more information, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/