The 21st IOCCC Has Been Announced

leob writes "As promised at the end of the 20th IOCCC earlier this year, the 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest will accept entries from 2012-Aug-15 03:14:15 UTC to 2012-Sep-14 09:26:53 UTC. The earliest announcement about the next contest was on Twitter on July 13, giving the interested parties more than 2 months to polish their entries."

Re:GREAT NEWS !! I MISSED THE 20TH !!

[azalin]

There are few things that are more NERD than entering (or actually winning) a contest like this. It requires creativity, programming skills, is hard to do, of very limited actual use and only a handful people will appreciate it. Have fun!

Yeah, but when is the Underhanded C Contest

[Rei]

...coming back? Just my luck that the first year I entered it, it died... :P

Re:

[stderr_dk]

...coming back? Just my luck that the first year I entered it, it died... :P

You killed it! Damn you and your underhanded C code!

Re:

[Rei]

Hehehe, you got me ;)

It's actually a really fun contest to take part in, first selecting what bug or group of bugs you want to exploit, and then how you want to hide them. the contest last year was to make it so that if a baggage handler typed a special but inconspicuous comment on the bag, it'd reroute the bag to some mean location. My "bug" was that the user's comment was stored in a struct in a string of a specific length but there was no bounds checking, so their comment string could overwrite the des

C is outdated

[GhigoRenzulli]

How long for the International Obfuscated Cobol Code Contest? Wait... forget it.

Re:

[Hyperhaplo]

It's still on.. and has been for over 4 decades.. do try to keep up ..

IOC++CC and IOPERLCC etc

[vlm]

insert standard joke about no need for a IOC++CC because C++ is inherently obfuscated. And Perl.

Re:IOC++CC and IOPERLCC etc

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: International Legible Perl Contest Announced!

Extra points for using all of perl's obscure features and alternate syntaxes while still keeping things readable and even beautiful!

Re:

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Fun fact: I did that as my first professional program using libraries. It was ripped apart in code review because of the use of modules was innefficeint and not "zen like" enough.

Could extend this to natural languages.

[Rei]

Along the lines of the grammatically-correct sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".

Re:Could extend this to natural languages.

[hvm2hvm]

Not a good idea, a contest like that would only make language arts students think their college degree will be useful for something...

Re:

[subreality]

There is an entire profession for this: Lawyers.

They're making it too easy

[dkleinsc]

They should have made the announcement in the form of a crazy-looking C program in the shape of a smiley face that prints out the entire contest rules, but has a syntax error somewhere that causes a seg fault.

Re:

[jimicus]

Pretty sure one of the rules of the IOCCC is that code submitted must compile and execute without dying horribly.

Been waiting

[elfprince13]

Been waiting for this, I actually have something fun/abusive in mind for this year, that I'm looking forward to implementing, "polishing", and submitting.

Significance of the times

[alhirzel]

What is the significance of the end time of the competition? With the first being pi it would surprise me if the end time were random...

Re:

[leob]

pi = 3.141592653...