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Coding Obfuscation

Saturday, June 25, 2005 by digitalpeer

The The International Obfuscated C Code Contest has always been interesting. It's fun to read when it's intentional.

Ran across some great examples of Coding Obfuscation that started out making me laugh- then I quickly got disgruntled when I reflected on code i've read by other people. The first example shown is fun ...

char *p;
switch (n)
{
case 1:
    p = "one";
    if (0)
case 2:
    p = "two";
    if (0)
case 3:
    p = "three";
    printf("%s", p);
    break;
}

This reminds me of the example in Coroutines in C.

Even cooler, is the Befunge programming language. I can't believe I've never seen it despite its age. It's a pretty inspirational piece of work at an inherent obfuscated programming language that adds a little more challenge as if it's needed.

Can you read this?

  9::*2*+00p0v"."0<
>310p0","     >"llaw eht no "v  >#v_ ^
^_210p0"--:"                 v  ,  
 :    v     " of beer"       <  :  
 -                >"selttob"00g.^ <     <
 1         >00g1-#^_$" elttob erom enO" ^
      >00g#^_$" selttob erom oN"        ^
 ^_110p0",dnuora ti ssap ,nwod eno ekaT"^
  ^:-1_010p00g1-00pvv:-1g01_@#g00,*25<
      ^             <