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International Obfuscated C Code Contest

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (abbr. IOCCC) is a programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated code C programming language code held annually since 1984 (with the exception of 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2003). There are many winning entries each year, and each entry gets a category like Worst Abuse of the C preprocessor or Most Erratic Behavior .

The IOCCC was started by Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel. They were talking together about the horrible code it was their jobs to maintain. They decided to hold a contest for the worst possible C code. Within the code size limit of only a few kilobytes, the contestants manage to do complicated things — the 2004 winner turned out an operating system.

Some quotes from 2004 winners include,

To keep things simple, I have avoided the C preprocessor and tricky statements such as if , for , do , while , switch , and goto .

We still aren t sure whether or not this is a useful program, but it s the first atomic fission we ve seen in the IOCCC.

Why not use the program to hide another program in the program It must have seemed reasonable at the time.

The program implements an 11-bit Arithmetic logic unit in the pre-processor.

I found that calculating prime numbers up to 1024 makes the program include itself over 6.8 million times.

An example entry would be [http://www0.us.ioccc.org/years.html#1988]:

#define _ -F