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It's fun how these are a matter of perspective. Many view the very fact that it's possible to write obfuscated Perl as a weakness in Perl itself, while others
by robertskmiles 15y ago
It's fun how these are a matter of perspective.
Many view the very fact that it's possible to write obfuscated Perl as a weakness in Perl itself, while others see it as a strength. Similarly, the fact that a piece of code can look perfectly innocuous and do something evil is, in my view at least, a serious problem with the C language.
Also, I laughed at "Underhanded C Contest: The official perfectly innocent web page for law-abiding good guys".
- amatus 15y agoI don't think this contest depends on a serious problem with the C language. The 2008 winner (http://underhanded.xcott.com/?page_id=17 http://underhanded.xcott.com/?page_id=17) could have been written in any language.
- scott_s 15y agoIndeed, what impressed me about that entry was it was a fundamental error that is surprisingly subtle. It could have easily been implemented in Python in about the same number of lines.
- robertskmiles 15y agoThat's true, I think that one is particularly impressive because for that reason. Nonetheless if you look at the majority of entries, the main techniques used are things like heavy wizardry with pointers, broken macros, and other preprocessor stuff, which, while admittedly not unique to C, are not so bad in most other languages.
- sp332 15y agoThe most coveted prize is the "we had to change the rules because of this entry" prize. The shortest quine is an empty .c file (with some Makefile mangling), stuff like that :)
- scott_s 15y agoI believe you're thinking of the Obfuscated C contest. This is rather the opposite of that - non-obfuscated code with subtle bugs.