Author:

• Name: Steinar Hamre
  Location: NO - Kingdom of Norway (Norway)

To build:

    make

Bugs and (Mis)features:

The current status of this entry is:

STATUS: INABIAF - please DO NOT fix

For more detailed information see 2006/hamre in bugs.html.

To use:

    ./hamre math_expression_string

Try:

    ./try.sh

Judges’ remarks:

An irrationally coded source presents rational things!

A rational person might want to attempt the irrational task of supporting a new operator by way of an existing macro in the source. And can you determine which macro this is and understand the purpose of its arguments?

Author’s remarks:

This is a calculator for rational numbers. Believe it or not, that is a useful tool to have around, and I haven’t found a useful version, much less an obfuscated one.

It is rather feature complete as rational calculators go. The supported operators are: +, - (binary and unary), *, / and (). Run it by supplying an expression as the first argument, and the normalized result will be written to stdout.

    ./hamre '-1+4/3*(2+1/(3/2*(7/2-7/3+1/6)))/2'
    2/3

If you do not supply an argument, the calculator will crash. Other arguments are ignored. Supplying more arguments may further limit the number of nested operators supported.

Remember that 1/0 is not a rational number. You will not get any answer if you divide by zero.

By default, only 31 nested levels of operators are supported.

The code is well documented, even with an example. In fact this documentation accounts for 100% of the source. Personally I find preprocessing or re-indenting the program counterproductive when it comes to understanding the source. The preprocessed source becomes rather verbose.

IOCCC entries are often loaded with all kinds of hard-coded numbers. I have restricted myself to mostly use sensible numbers (<= 7) as smaller numbers are much easier to remember. Also the macros really help hide most of the uses of these numbers away. All macros and variables are easy-to-remember single character abbreviations, from some language, meaningful to the purpose(s) of the macro, I hope.

Primary files

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

Secondary files

• 2006_hamre.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