Author:

• Name: Larry Jones
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make all

To use:

    ./scjones

Try:

    ./try.sh

Judges’ remarks:

The addition of trigraphs has made it easier to make programs hard to read. It was a dark and stormy night for C when the ANSI C committee added trigraphs to the standard. Too bad that they didn’t just simply require a more reasonable ISO character set.

The Author sent us this note after he was informed that he won:

Although I am quite grateful for the “ANSI Committee's Worst Abuse of C” title (were you aware that I am a member of the committee or is the double meaning unintentional?), I was really hoping for something more along the lines of “Closest Resemblance to Line Noise.” :-)

… it was unintentional.

Author’s remarks:

Since this year’s contest is dedicated to ANSI C, here is a strictly conforming entry. In accordance with the ANSI definition of a strictly conforming program it does not produce output dependent on any unspecified, undefined, or implementation defined behavior, and it does not exceed any of the minimum implementation limits. It adheres to all of the syntactic and semantic constraints of the standard: it #includes the relevant headers for the functions it uses, and it uses the EXIT_SUCCESS and EXIT_FAILURE macros to return a correct success/fail status to the invoking program. It also uses trigraphs for characters which are not in the Invariant Code Set of ISO 646:1983, so it will be portable to machines with deficient (from C’s standpoint) character sets. In short, it should be very widely portable. As an extra added attraction, all of the lines are under 72 characters long, which would allow for sequence numbers to be punched in columns 73-80 :-).

Primary files

• scjones.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• scjones.orig.c - original source code
• try.sh - script to try entry

Secondary files

• 1990_scjones.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

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