Author:

• Name: Jens Schweikhardt
  Location: DE - Federal Republic of Germany (Germany)

To build:

    make all

To use:

    ./schweikh1

Try:

To find the day that Easter falls on in the current year and to show all Easter dates from 1582 to 2199:

    ./try.sh

Judges’ remarks:

Look at the source. There is something very odd going on here. Where does the real code come from if everything is a C pre-processor statement?

Clearly this is either the Best Use or the Worst Abuse of the C Preprocessor that the judges have seen this year!

Author’s remarks:

What this program does

This program is an implementation of an algorithm that calculates the date of the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. (Also known as “Easter”, defined this way by the Nicaean Concilium in 325 Anno Domini.) The algorithm is attributed to the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss [“Meyers Handbuch ueber das Weltall” ‘Handbook About Space’, Meyer, 5th Edition, 1973, p149] and is suitable for anni domini within the Gregorian Calendar, that is, from ad 1582 to ad 2199:

Let J be the year.
If J is from 1582 to 1699, let M be 22 and N be 2.
If J is from 1700 to 1799, let M be 23 and N be 3.
If J is from 1800 to 1899, let M be 23 and N be 4.
If J is from 1900 to 2099, let M be 24, let N be 5.
If J is from 2100 to 2199, let M be 24, let N be 6.
Let a be the modulus of J divided by 19.
Let b be the modulus of J divided by 4.
Let c be the modulus of J divided by 7.
Let d be the modulus of (19a + M) divided by 30.
Let e be the modulus of (2b + 4c + 6d + N) divided by 7.

The interesting Sunday is either (only one of them is a valid date):

March 22 + d + e; or
April d + e - 9

with the following exceptions:

April 26 must always be changed to April 19.
April 25 must be changed to April 18 if d is 28 and a is greater than 10.

Example:

    J = 1962, M = 24, N = 5
    a = J % 19 == 5
    b = J %  4 == 2
    c = J %  7 == 2
    d = 119 % 30 == 29
    e = 191 % 7 == 2

March 53 is invalid, so the result is April 22 1962.

Why I think this is obfuscated

Apart from the calculation of the Easter date, the definition and calculation of which are obfuscations in their own right, obfuscation lurks in many places. Look at those macro identifiers. What can be more obvious than a program that explicitly mentions the grammatical constructs it is composed of? If you look at K&RII A.9.3 you will find that a compound statement consists of an opening brace followed by a declaration list followed by a semicolon followed by a statement list followed by another semicolon and a closing brace. Nobody can learn that by heart so I gently remind the reader by defining a macro that expresses this clearly (line 25). This goes up to the definition of a translation unit. Unfortunately, due to the IOCCC’s size restrictions, I had to abbreviate some syntactic elements. ae actually reads “assignment expression”. I had to stop at some arbitrary point, so don’t waste your time trying to find out how preprocessing tokens form type qualifier lists, cast expressions or direct abstract declarators. Assuming the reader knows about these easy to remember language elements is justified in my opinion.

The moral:

Try to be as precise as can be and no one will comprehend what you mean.

The formula:

    comprehension = 1/(2**precision)

The interpretation:

“Say nothing and everybody will understand.”

The -I/usr/include in the build file is needed by gcc on Solaris because gcc’s “fixed” header in gcc-lib/sparc-sun-solaris2.5/2.7.2/include/errno.h is broken (sort of) because it has two identical extern declarations of errno. This leads to an error due to the redefinition of main. The -I option makes sure the working /usr/include/errno.h is found first, which shouldn’t cause any problems on other systems.

Usage:

The program is run without arguments. It prints all dates in order.

Primary files

• schweikh1.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• schweikh1.orig.c - original source code
• errno.h - declare errno as an extern int
• try.sh - script to try entry

Secondary files

• 1996_schweikh1.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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