C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability | Hacker News Reader

C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability

theregister.com

131 pointsBender22 comments

I wonder at what level you could enforce/how far you could take the idea of "don't allow invalid states to be represented" to a programming language, to prevent this kind of language debauchery.

C does seem to sit at the perfect intersection of language age and low-level access to allow this kind of competition, whereas something like Go seems far less suited for it. Javascript is routinely obfuscated pretty well for human readers. I'm not familiar enough with Rust to say, but I bet with what little I know of its syntax you could create some pretty ugly stuff?

You can write programs of a similar spirit in most languages. C has a programming culture that's much more tolerant of it than say, Python though.

Zig could probably support a similar contest as it grows up.

With macro rust can surely produce some creative stuff

I used to write obfuscated C for fun. I haven’t touched it in a while, but as I recall there are really two C syntax features that unlock most of the “magic”. Whitespace is generally not significant, so you can cram a whole lot onto a single line. And the combination of pointers and weak typing lets you be as anarchist as you like about manipulating data. (Oh, and the preprocessor. The one and - thankfully - only C preprocessor.)

Of the two^H^Hhree, I think that the first is what contributes most to the aesthetic appeal of obfuscated C. The only other languages I’ve used that are as good for making code that looks impenetrable are Forth and JavaScript, both of which share that feature.

(Probably any lisp, too, but for some reason I’ve never actually tried. I can say, though, that the most confusing codebase I ever inherited was written in Clojure.)

So yes, I’m inclined to agree that Rust can be a good language for writing deliberately ugly code, and Go not so much. But for a different, perhaps more trivial reason.

Forth is almost cheating...

If any you can do the same weird tricks as obfuscated C but with 100% clean code.

Typechecking is more less picking a decidable set of invalid programs and making an efficient checker for them. As for ruling out programming styles, a language is, after all, Turing complete, so one could write an IR and an interpreter and then encode the rest of the program in the IR...

Personally, while I see the social advantages of having all code in one language be similarly structured and use the same idioms, I think a language is meant to be used, and it should offer all the building blocks for writing programs in whatever is the most natural way.

On the subleq VM, it would run faster if they implemented Muxleq, but it woudn't win the IOCCC contest maybe. Altough in unobfuscated it's C it's just an extra short if clause with two more lines.

On 32k roms for the GB emulator:

https://github.com/tbsp/Adjustris

Old build:

https://pdroms.de/?__df=24010f101611170c163a13544b55553a4d22...

Someone ping back the IOCCC creator, please.

They already added indirect addressing (see https://github.com/adriancable/eternal/blob/main/docs/machin...) to make it faster.

TL;DR: the one entry implemented a subleq machine. Google it - it’s a One Instruction Set Computer (OISC). This made me smile. But it also raised a question: when were OISC’s first conceived? Would Apollo and computers of that era have benefitted from this insight?

that entry won not because it "just" implemented subleq. Dude also made LLVM backend for it, drivers, set up full-on compiler and successfully did compile-and-run for tons of various programs

Given the Mandelbrot program is 450k probably not.

A mandelbrot under pure subleq made with the HSQ compiler (which a micro-C) would weight far less.

> Nixie tube is a tiny electrical tube with filaments in the shapes of all the digits stacked one on top of another, and it displays the desired digit by making just that filament glow

Lol, no. That's a Numitron (although they were 7 segment)

You are confidently incorrect.

https://ethw.org/Nixie_Tubes

Filament implies it is resistively heated, per tube terminology. Nixie is essentially a neon lamp, specially shaped, whose cathode is cold.

You are of course right, but you should have pointed out that the text quoted by you was not 100% wrong, because the ten cathodes have indeed the forms of the ten digits and they are stacked one above the other.

The only wrong parts were that the cathodes are not filaments and the cathodes themselves do not glow.

The Nixie tubes are filled with neon at low pressure and the electric discharges through them produce the so-called negative light, i.e. where the luminescent gas is confined around the cathode. Therefore the negative light takes the shape of the cathode. The cathodes are not glowing, but they are surrounded by glowing neon gas.

In my opinion, negative light, which comes from an apparently empty space, looks somehow more beautiful than solid light emitters, like an incandescent filament or a fluorescent lamp (like VFD, i.e. vacuum fluorescent displays; display tubes with incandescent filaments or with fluorescent segments were alternatives to Nixie tubes, until all of them were replaced by cheaper LEDs and LCDs).

The neon tubes that were used in advertising for making letters or other shapes, use positive light instead of negative light, i.e. where the luminescent gas occupies most of the glass tube, away from the electrodes, so giving various shapes to the glass tube provides various shapes of the visible light, regardless of the shapes of the electrodes (unlike for negative light, where the shape of the cathode matters, while the shape of the glass tube is irrelevant).

your article says it's a gas discharge vacuum tube, so no filament. You seem to be confidently incorrect too.

Multiple types of gas discharge vacuum tubes use a filament of some sort for excitation, be it a coil or grid.

Nixie tubes, like all gas-discharge tubes with negative light, do not use any filament.

A filament could be needed with a higher pressure gas, to emit electrons that would ionize the gas, to facilitate the initiation of a discharge. A filament might also be needed sometimes when the gas is a metal vapor, like mercury vapor or sodium vapor, in order to heat and vaporize the metal, though that is more commonly done by adding some noble gas, like neon, to cause a preliminary discharge that heats the metal until enough vapor is present, which allows the initiation of the main discharge.

"The glass tube contains a wire-mesh anode and multiple cathodes," - per Wiki

That's filament. A construction of filaments, but a filament nonetheless.

I concur

Also, Nixie Tubes were absolutely not “tiny.” Typically, they were about the same size as a vacuum tube you’d find in the back of your radio or TV. They were universally used on electronic equipment; less so on consumer devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com