Best Algorithm: <schweikh@noc.dfn.de> Jens Schweikhardt

    Jens Schweikhardt
    DFN Network Operation Center
    Schlartaeckerweg 3 (home address)
    D-71384 Weinstadt
    Germany

    http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/People/schweikhardt/home.html


Judges' comments:

    To use:
	make schweikh2
	
	./schweikh2

    Also try:

        ./schweikh2 15 1 0 0/0

    The program accepts up to 4 parameters:

	 1) The number of operators in the expression [default: 9]

	 2) The value of the first operand [default: 1]

	 3) The (possibly negative) increment to the next operand [default: 1]

	 4) The goal value or 0/0 [default: 42]

    The original program, with only slight obfuscations, may be found
    in hunni.c.  The perl script, obfuscates it appropriately:

	perl ./hunni.pl < hunni.c

    This entry was another crowd pleaser at the IOCCC BOF.


Selected notes from the author:

    Note: the source must be viewed with tabstop 8. To appreciate the
    beauty have your eyes half closed.

    Why I think this program is obfuscated:

    C is a free format language. It is therefore a question of style how
    variables, operators, declarations, functions and syntactic elements
    like braces and parentheses are grouped together. As a rule of thumb,
    I put spaces around operators, after opening braces and before closing
    braces. I have generalized this rule by putting whitespace after *any*
    non-white space character (with the exception of preprocessor directives).
    There are no recognizable keywords anymore. There are no recognizable
    string literals any more. The main function is invisible. All operators
    longer than one character have gone. They have been replaced by macro
    calls with quite a number of arguments. The keys are the token pasting
    and stringizing macros e and O. The "arcane rules of token pasting"
    [K&R2] are used up to three levels, H(O,r)R(O,r)! which is needed to make
    one 8-character token from 8 characters ('unsigned'). BTW, C has no 9 or
    more character reserved words, so a fourth level is only required if
    you intend to generate object names from 9 or more components. The final
    round even swaps the tokens, so all keywords must be spelled backwards
    (sort of, can you spot printf in the P macro?).

    Try to indent the source. The unbalanced parentheses confuse Solaris'
    indent to the max (although the result does compile):

    Looking at the indented source is even *less* fun, because the nice
    diamond pattern has been replaced by something that looks like, uhm,
    modem noise. 

    Lint the source. It's clean. How obfuscated...

    What's the exit status? The program exits with J - 1 where J is the
    return value from several non-void functions (needed to shut up
    lint). The last assignment is J = printf ("%c", 10); so the exit
    status is 0 unless the last printf failed, which is even a *useful*
    status. A further obfuscation is the use of 10 instead of '\n'.
    '\n' can not be constructed by token pasting, AFAIK. That's why schweikh2 
    is likely to produce occasional garbage on non-ASCII execution character
    set systems.

    What this program does:
    -----------------------

    The program is an expression evaluator for a limited class of
    expressions. Known operators are + - * /, operands are real numbers
    (integers or fractions). The operands are restricted in that they must
    differ by a constant value, for example 1 + 2 * 3 / 4 - 5. For any
    combination of operators the expression is evaluated and compared to a
    goal value. If they compare equal the expression is printed. If the goal
    value is specified as 0/0 all expressions and results are printed. For
    any fraction, the numerator and denominator are divided by their
    greatest common divisor. 

    The program accepts up to 4 parameters:
     1) The number of operators in the expression [default: 9]
     2) The value of the first operand [1]
     3) The (possibly negative) increment to the next operand [1]
     4) The goal value or 0/0 [42]

    On ANSI/ISO C conformant systems (where long is at least 32 bits)
    overflow will occur in the default case (first operand 1, increment 1)
    only for more than 11 operators. Because a bit mask is used that needs
    twice the number of operands in bits (plus a sentinel value) on those
    systems the first parameter must not exceed 15. 

    If long is at least 64 bits overflow will occur for more than 19
    operators but you will probably wait quite some time for every of the
    4^19 = 274,877,906,944 combinations to be evaluated... While I'm at it,
    on a 50 MHz sparc, 4^11 expressions are evaluated in about 3 cpu
    minutes (gcc -O3). 

    Sample arguments:
    -----------------
    $ schweikh2 6
    $ schweikh2 7 0
    $ schweikh2 7 7 0 
    $ schweikh2 8 9 -1 -67/21
    $ schweikh2 8 2 2/5 -98/25
    $ schweikh2 2 1/0 1 1/0

    Miscellaneous
    -------------

    The diamond pattern can be continued without a break. 
    For a nice printout try this on your Bourne compatible shell
    % while :; do grep -v '#' schweikh2.c; done