On Writing An IOCCC One-Liner

There is a tug-of-war when writing a one-liner between obscurity
and length.  On the one hand, one-liners are often obscure in nature,
simply by doing so much with so little.  As well, the reduction of
interesting logic into a single line typically involves transformations
that tend to obscure the logic in the hunt for fewer bytes.

Sometimes, the minimalist logic can be easily deciphered because
of the simplified logic required to get it into one line, and due
to the almost necessary reliance on stdlib routines to do the heavy
lifting.  printf, scanf, getchar, putchar, atoi, isspace, isdigit,
are succinct but explicit size-reducing functions, and may sometimes
open an unwanted window on the nature of the otherwise obscured logic.

The flip-side, replacing these routines, invariably requires more
bytes.  So what is a one-liner-writer to do when confronted by such
a choice?  Therein lies the art form, and the risk: the additional
obscurity requiring additional bytes may push a one-liner close to
or over the limit.  Fewer bytes is generally better, until it is not.

Further, the predilections of the judges may change daily, for all
this author knows.  The guidelines are opaque on purpose.  So brevity,
or better obscurity?  Both if at all possible, but perhaps at some
risk for being juuuuuust too long, or not quiiiiiiite obscure enough.

Finally, the desire for clean compilation is almost anathema to an
obscure one-liner.  The extra characters of the types and storage
classes, which are historically implicit, but made explicit to
silence modern compilers, tend to occupy the very precious bytes
left in the one-liner budget.

It is a fun challenge to write something "interesting" within the
draconian budget.  As history has shown, most years someone conceives
of something clever enough.  This year, the present author is hopeful
the artistic balance is deemed favorable, and is interesting to the
world at large.  But if not, it was still fun to write -- and with no
small amount of angst for the final form of the entry, of which there
were several different attempts at the same algorithm, each with
different compromises in logic, expression, and obscurity mechanisms.

Because there is a tug-of-war between obscurity and brevity.