Author:

• Name: Alan De Smet
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make chaos

NOTE: Some systems do not implement halfdelay() in their libcurses. You might try compiling with -lncurses if you have that library. Or you can build this entry without the halfdelay() call by:

    make chaos_nohalf

Bugs and (Mis)features:

The current status of this entry is:

STATUS: INABIAF - please DO NOT fix

For more detailed information see 1998/chaos in bugs.html.

To use:

    ./chaos

Try:

    ./try.sh

This script will run the program on each data file. To quit the program hit q. If not all files have been used it will go to the next one; otherwise the script will be finished. To end the script early send intr/ctrl-c.

The script will give you instructions on how to use the program and things to try each time it is run, as a helpful reminder.

Judge’s Comments:

This is the author’s first IOCCC entry. We thought the entry was a nice example of a compact collection of obfuscations.

Can you figure out why, in some cases, it wants to read itself?

Author’s remarks:

Usage

The executable takes a single argument for the data file to use. If no argument is given, it will find a data file by itself, don’t worry about it…

Summary

This is a simple ncurses 3D object viewer. The keys y, u, i, h, j, and k rotate. a and z zoom in and out. q quits. Given about 3 seconds of no input, it will start rotating until interrupted by user input.

Features (aka Bugs):

Memory malloc(3)ed is never freed. This shouldn’t be a big deal, since only one block is ever allocated, and the OS should recover it.

My local flavor of lint doesn’t seem to like the fact that I never return from main(). Feh, what does it know? Otherwise, ignoring lint’s over protectiveness (“Of course I’m not using all of the functions defined in curses.h!”), it’s lint clean.

If the compiler happens to generate the byte sequence “AlWuzEre” in the executable by chance, the program may be unable to locate the embedded string. As a result, running the program without an external data file may act in undefined ways.

If the compiler doesn’t store char * P’s data in a nice contiguous stream, it would be bad. As above, it would break running the program without an external data file.

If the incoming data is corrupt, the results are undefined. (Although dumping core is a popular result.)

When a point passes behind the camera, it is still plotted. The object will “bounce” off the camera, but the result (some points in front, some reflected from the rear) looks really odd. And it sometimes hangs. So just don’t fly through objects. You’ll be happier.

Primary files

• chaos.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• chaos.orig.c - original source code
• try.sh - script to try entry
• cube.data - data file for cube 3d object
• desk.data - data file for desk 3d object
• ioccc.data - data file for IOCCC 3d object
• pyramid.data - data file for pyramid 3d object
• xwing.data - data file for X-Wing 3d object

Secondary files

• 1998_chaos.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

Jump to: top