Author:

• Name: Brian Westley
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make

There are two additional programs based on the author’s remarks and the original version, provided as alternate code as it might be less portable. See sorted code, punch card code and alternate code below.

Bugs and (Mis)features:

The current status of this entry is:

STATUS: uses gets() - change to fgets() if possible
STATUS: missing files - please provide them
STATUS: main() has only one arg - try and make it have 2 or 3

For more detailed information see 2001/westley in bugs.html.

To use:

    ./westley 2>/dev/null
    # enter some input, terminate with EOF

    echo foo | ./westley 2>/dev/null

    ./westley < westley.c 2>/dev/null

Try:

    ./try.sh

Sorted code:

The author stated that one can sort (ignoring leading blanks i.e. sort -b) the code by line and it will always sort the order of the input.

This is generated and compiled by default; use westley.sort as you would westley above.

Punch card code:

The author also stated that if you just sort the code (sort westley.c) you’ll get a version that just prints out the punch card. The westley.punch.c (generated by make via sort westley.c) code is specifically so that Westley can punch everyone in the face! :-) This is also compiled by default.

Punch card try:

    echo 'Brian Westley does it again!' | ./westley.punch 2>/dev/null

Alternate code:

An alternate version of this entry, westley.alt.c, is provided. This alternate code might be less portable.

Alternate build:

    make alt

Alternate use:

Use westley.alt as you would westley above.

Judges’ remarks:

Try copying the source to a new file and changing around the order of the lines. Does it produce the exact same output?

By changing the order of the source, figure out in how many different ways this program can transform input to output.

This assortment of obfuscated lines takes position-independent code to a new level! :-)

We find it amazing that with just 28 lines of code (not counting comments and blank lines) there are 28! or 304,888,344,611,713,860,501,504,000,000 versions of the program, all valid C!

Author’s remarks:

Punch cards, or Hollerith cards, were becoming obsolete just as C was becoming more popular¹; this is rather unfortunate, because C has an advantage over many other languages when it comes to punch cards - C programs can be written to be “drop proof”.

Consider the following C program:

    main(){a();b();c();}
    a(){printf("A");}
    b(){printf("B");}
    c(){printf("C");}

This program will compile and run no matter what order the lines are in. If you punch it on cards (one line of code per card, naturally) and drop them, you don’t need to put them in any particular order²; it will always produce ABC as output.

You can also use global variables:

    char *greet = "Hello, world!";
    char *greet; main(){puts(greet);}

It would be trivial to write an entire C program that is “drop proof” using the above techniques; surprisingly, it’s possible to write a program that will always compile but behave differently depending on the line order:

    test(a,b){return a;}
    #define test(a,b) test(b,a)
    main(){if (test(0,1)) printf("T"); else printf("F");}

This program will print out T if the #define statement falls between the declaration of test() and its use in main(), otherwise it will print out F. Furthermore, you can use the same call to test() repeatedly in different lines to return different values:

    #define test(x,y) test(y,x)
    main(){int i=0;a(&i);b(&i);c(&i);d(&i);printf("%d\n",i);}
    a(i)int*i;{if (test(0,1)) *i += 1;}
    b(i)int*i;{if (test(0,1)) *i += 2;}
    c(i)int*i;{if (test(0,1)) *i += 4;}
    d(i)int*i;{if (test(0,1)) *i += 8;}
    test(x,y){return x;}

If you enter the above program on punch cards, throw them up in the air, gather them up, and run it, you will get a number from 0 to 15 printed out. Now that’s a random number generator…

Of course, there are drawbacks to C programming on punch cards; an 80-character line limit can be restricting, and (to be maximally portable) you need to use trigraphs for the characters ^[]{}\ (these aren’t found on every keypunch, and have various encodings).

My C program entry does the following:

1. Reads in lines.

2. Rearranges the lines, or not.

   • if it rearranges the lines, they are sorted or scrambled.

3. Reverses the order of the lines, or not.

4. Prints out the lines as either text or EBCDIC punch cards.

The code, as written, scrambles the input and prints it out as normal text, so you can simulate ‘dropping’ the cards. You can repeatedly scramble the code to get all 12 variants (but the scrambling isn’t very random; it’s just a bubble sort with a random number, so some variants are more common than others). You can also just swap the arguments in the calls to t() in all combinations to get all the variations.

If you sort the lines, you will get the version that just prints out the input as punch cards (you will need to display at least 82 columns of text, or clip the last few chars by piping it through sed s/...$//). If you use this on the original code, you will see that it spells out HOLLERITH when punched on cards (you can see the tall, thin letters spelling out HOLLERITH if you turn the C code sideways). You will also see why /KC 0000 K is a Hollerith emoticon. Unrecognized characters are punched as a lace column. (You can see an ASCII simulation of the code as punch cards by looking at card.gif.)

For a nice test pattern, try

    &-0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQR/STUVWXYZ:#@'=".<(+|!$*);,%_>?abcmnoxyz^[]{}\

If you want to analyze the program, sorting the lines while ignoring leading blanks works best (sort -b). This will produce the version that just reverses the line order, and the routines in the code are in a sensible order.

This program should work on EBCDIC computers. It assumes that the time_t ptr param to time(3) will work with an int ptr, and that “passing through” a char[][] array as a simple char * is OK. Your compiler MUST understand trigraphs, or it will miss the trigraph backslash before the double quote in the K string and complain about a malformed string; for GNU C, use -ansi or -trigraphs. Entering a line of more than 80 characters, or more than 81 lines, will jam the card reader.

I’ve used the a[b] ==> *(a+b) trick, because this is actually shorter than the trigraph version of a??(b??).

With 28 lines of code (not counting the blank lines or the comment), there are technically 28! different programs, or 304,888,344,611,713,860,501,504,000,000 different versions, all legal C.

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Footnotes

1. except in Florida voting machines↩︎

2. all cards must be face down, nine-edge first, of course.↩︎

Primary files

• westley.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• westley.alt.c - alternate source code
• westley.orig.c - original source code
• try.sh - script to try entry

Secondary files

• 2001_westley.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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