Author:

• Name: Ron McFarland
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make all

To use:

    ./rcm < file.gz

where file.gz is some gzipped file.

Try:

For more information try:

    ./try.sh

Judges’ remarks:

For a good no-op try:

    gzip -c < rcm.c | ./rcm

NOTE: this is done in the try.sh script as well, along with some other commands including a way to do the above command but with more steps.

Author’s remarks:

Except for some silly requirements regarding input validation, CRC checking, and similar unimportant fluff, this program is a fully compliant RFC1951/RFC1952 GNU Gzip file uncompressor. Feed it a gzip compressed file on standard input, and it will write the fully uncompressed original file to standard output.

ObJustifications for this entry:

The Design Trade-off Argument:

“The 184 characters worth of defines in the build file have been carefully offset by 184 redundant and unnecessary ‘{’, ‘}’, and ‘;’ characters in the source file.”

The Design Review Argument:

“Using only 216 characters out of a maximum of 256, the build file meets and actually exceeds specification.”

The Program Metrics Argument:

“The program source is less than 3,100 characters in length and uncompresses the file emacs-19.34b.tar.gz in about 130 seconds on my HP 9000/735. The now obsolete source file inflate.c from the GNU gzip source tree is 31,613 characters in length and uncompresses the emacs distribution file in slightly under 25 seconds. Thus:

3100 / 130 = 23.85

vs:

31613 / 25 = 1264.52

which represents a better than 530% improvement in the ratio of source file size to execution time.”

The Whining Programmer’s Argument:

“The inflate algorithm requires that over 400 characters worth of constants and tables be defined. Which means the program itself had to be squeezed down to about 1,100 IOCCC countable bytes.”

Primary files

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

Secondary files

• 1996_rcm.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
• rfc1951.gz - RFC 1951 gzipped
• rfc1952.gz - RFC 1952 gzipped
• index.html - this web page

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