Cody Boone Ferguson
a9d9250afb
This includes moving from the author's comments the note from the judges that he had sent a note to the judges asking something about the award title along with the judges' reply. It seemed like the more appropriate place to have it.
2.6 KiB
ANSI Committee's Worst Abuse of C
Larry Jones
SDRC
2000 Eastman Dr
Milford, OH 45150
USA
To build:
make all
Modern compilers failed to compile this entry:
scjones.c:1:7: error: expected ';' after top level declarator
char*a??(??)=??<
^
;
but we were able to get it to compile with modern compilers by specifying the
-ansi flag with a tip from Yusuke Endoh. Thank
you Yusuke!
Cody Boone Ferguson pointed out that the
compiler option -trigraphs would also have worked.
To run:
./scjones
Judges' comments:
The addition of trigraphs has made it easier to make programs hard to read. It was a dark and stormy night for C when the ANSI C committee added trigraphs to the standard. Too bad that they didn't just simply require a more reasonable ISO character set.
The Author sent us this note after he was informed that he won:
Although I am quite grateful for the "ANSI Committee's Worst Abuse of C" title (were you aware that I am a member of the committee or is the double meaning unintentional?), I was really hoping for something more along the lines of "Closest Resemblance to Line Noise." :-)
... it was unintentional.
Author's comments:
Since this year's contest is dedicated to ANSI C, here is a strictly conforming
entry. In accordance with the ANSI definition of a strictly conforming program
it does not produce output dependent on any unspecified, undefined, or
implementation defined behavior, and it does not exceed any of the minimum
implementation limits. It adheres to all of the syntactic and semantic
constraints of the standard: it #includes the relevant headers for the
functions it uses, and it uses the EXIT_SUCCESS and EXIT_FAILURE macros to
return a correct success/fail status to the invoking program. It also uses
trigraphs for characters which are not in the Invariant Code Set of ISO 646:1983, so it will be portable to machines with deficient (from C's
standpoint) character sets. In short, it should be very widely portable. As an
extra added attraction, all of the lines are under 72 characters long, which
would allow for sequence numbers to be punched in columns 73-80 :-).
Copyright and CC BY-SA 4.0 License:
This file is Copyright (c) 2023 by Landon Curt Noll. All Rights Reserved. You are free to share and adapt this file under the terms of this 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/