Prepare for the winners of **IOCCC28**. > However these are not the 2024 droids you are looking for. :-) The HTML menu (both JavaScript and non-JavaScript) has been updated. The `Status -> Rules and guidelines' have been replaced with two separate menus `Status -> IOCCC rules` and `Status -> IOCCC guidelines`. Added a new top level `social.html` page: built from a new `social.md`. Sorted rules for building specific web pages in the top level `Makefile`. Added `make social` to make the `social.html` page from `social.md`. The `bin/gen-top-html.sh` now is able to process a argument of **social** to process the new top level `social.html` page. Changed `bin/gen-top-html.sh` VERSION from "2.0.0 2025-03-13" to "2.0.1 2025-07-25". Below `About -> Home page` a new `About -> IOCCC social media` menu item as added. Because the menu change touched every HTML file, we changed the general copyright date range for HTML files from "1984-2024" to "1984-2025" due to the extensive changes made for **IOCCC28**. Those markdown files that were modified in 2025 had their copyright date range also changed from "1984-2024" to "1984-2025". Rebuilt tarballs and sitemap due to the extensive HTML rebuilding. Ran `make update` to perform the above.
To build:
make
Bugs and (Mis)features:
The current status of this entry is:
STATUS: INABIAF - please DO NOT fix
For more detailed information see 2015/hou in bugs.html.
To use:
echo something | ./prog
./prog < file
Try:
./try.sh
Judges' remarks:
A good start for understanding this entry might be rfc1321.txt. How does it compute this using only a single looping construct? The original reference source code for this algorithm is about 355 lines of code, yet this entry is only 199 lines with one statement per line and it isn't using lots of macro expansion tricks like the reference code!
Some things that make you go, "huh?"
./prog < prog.c | cut -c-5
./prog < Makefile | cut -c-4
How are those values magically returned?
What happens with a large file? Something over 256K.
./prog < large_file
Where does that message come from?
Author's remarks:
This looks like a normal C program.
Almost everything is a double.
There are tell-tale signs like pow(2,(?/12)) and exp(-?*?) (names redacted).
You can also find a bunch of cosines and polynomial evaluations.
It looks like a ????? ???????????, right?
Run and find out.
Why obfuscated
Some poor scripting folks only have access to doubles (Jav?script, L?a, BA?IC, etc.).
As a C programmer, I feel obliged to show a gesture of sympathy, to experience their pain and provide an answer.
Except when absolutely necessary (printf, int main(), array indexing), there
isn't a single integer. Even getchar() and EOF are immediately converted.
Since bool counts as an integer type too, there is no boolean either. No
comparison, no if, no ?:, no || &&. Everything is done in a single loop
that terminates on printf(3). Straight up arithmetic.
floor(3) and ceil(3) are technically double-to-double functions, but they feel
like cheating. Yes cos(3), no floor(3).
Limitations
Hard requirements:
-
The platform must implement the
doubletype as IEEE754-compliant 64-bit floating point numbers. The 80-bit intermediate format used by x87 is considered as an violation of this. The code should print an error message on such platforms. -
The program must start with the CPU / FPU in round-to-nearest mode.
Soft requirements:
-
The compiler must respect
volatile. The code is formatted to warn about that, though. -
The printed result is only correct on little-endian machines. The program takes care to warn about this issue after printing an incorrect big-endian result. Error messages become garbled, though.
Tested platforms:
- Linux 3.18.7, Rasperberry Pi 2, clang 3.0-6.2, (works)
- Linux 3.18.7, Rasperberry Pi 2, gcc 4.6.3, (works)
- Mac OS X 10, x64, Apple LLVM version 6.1.0 (clang-602.0.53), (works)
- Windows 8.1, x86, MSVC 2012 (works)
- Windows 8.1, x64, MSVC 2012 (works)
- Windows 8.1, x86, MinGW gcc 4.6.2 (fails, prints error message)
- Windows 8.1, x86, MinGW gcc 4.6.2 with -msse2 -mfpmath=sse (works)