Best One Liner

Stephen Sykes
Finland
https://web.archive.org/web/20160316092728/http://www.stephensykes.com/

To build:

make

To run:

./sykes2

Try:

./sykes2.sh

This will repeatedly remake the program and run it then sleep for one second for a nice show of time.

Judges' Comments:

As they say, "Lather, rinse, repeat"! :-)

If you have the time :-), figure out how this small 1-line entry works!

Author's remarks:

At 130 characters of C code (without the newline at the end), this should fit into the "1-liner" category.

The clock numerals are rendered as an old fashioned 7 segment display. The encodings for which segments light for which number, and for where each segment appears on screen are hidden in the two strings.

When reading the program, you may want to refer to a table of operator precedence (try man 7 operator) - careful choices were made to keep the usage of brackets to a minimum, and to keep the character count as low as possible.

One interesting bit of obfuscation - the null at the end of the second string actually forms part of the lookup table.

Intel CC warns about the lack of a declaration for the argument to main(). (gcc does not notice this though, even with -Wall.) But anyway it can easily be declared as int at the expense of 4 more characters.

I'm not sure of the effects on a hard disk of rewriting the same file multiple times per second for a long time. Run at your own risk!

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/