The Underhanded C contest | Hacker News Reader

The Underhanded C contest

underhanded.xcott.com

116 pointsgnosis11 comments

The contest ends in 2 days, having been open for 3 months.

Not enough time to participate, but no public results to examine either. Probably better to submit back then or wait until there are some cool entries to examine.

Apparently the most recent time it was held was 2009: http://underhanded.xcott.com/?page_id=22

Looks like good reading; and links to previous years are toward the top of that page.

Does anyone know whether a similar contest exists with common "easy to read" languages and relatively quirk-free like Python? It would appear to me that doing the same would be harder in such a language, though not at all impossible. I'd love to go through some examples.

I would think underhanded Python is too easy:

     if x:
          DoThis()
     <tab>DoThat()

Python disallows incongruous whitespace, doesn't it?

Python itself will allow you to do that (have an indent by 4 spaces, and a tab character on the next line) as far as I know, IDLE won't run though. Not that anyone should ever use IDLE.

I think the point is to be a bit more subtle than that.

Python doesn't allow you to mix spaces and tabs.

while not exactly similar in terms of objective, http://js1k.com might tickle your fancy - the aim is to write a javascript app within some category or definition which is provided at the start of the contest, and to use no more than 1kb for your app's code (not including what they give you). It can really test your ability to minify by hand!

my entry is in there. I would encourage anyone with a bit of spare time over the next few days to write up an entry! It's great fun and you're guaranteed to learn something if you try to build a creative exploit.

Looking back at previous years, this seems like a pretty fun contest. I wish I had seen it earlier (deadline is in 2 days). I'd love to try it out next year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com