Small talk about where such a dumb idea comes from
I started this project being very angry at a collegue at work. We had a strong argument about C language programming best practices. Precisely about wether we should use inline if operations in macro or not. Moreover with or without explicative comments. He said something like : “There is no point arguing about this, the code is quite clear about what’s happening”.
My point was, and is still : macros are quite hard to debug and using inline if operations only obfuscates the code.
We better ban them, just like goto, since their use is not compulsory for the language to work. I also think that
code should be documented and commented to express the will of the programmer if he wants the code to be well understood.
If you’re wondering why I am giving so much importance to this, I might tell you that, if you are a programmer you are very likely to work in a team. There will be people reading your code and, maybe someday, you will be gone, and somebody else will end up maintaining your code. In case the code is “self-documented” or “cristal clear” (I’ve heard this countless times), there is a non null probability that the code is not as clear as expected nor enough self-documenting. The final result being throwing away the code and starting the whole thing again. But, inventing the wheel twice is quite useless and, because “good code does not rust”, it is a complete waste of time to write it all again from scratch as long as the system for which it is written is not deprecated.
So, I decided to write a small programm that abused inline if operations to be as obscure as possible and which will only print out to the console the message : “You know my point about inline if operations , they only obfucate the code”. I knew that, if I succeeded, I could submit it to the IOCCC, but that was not the initial goal.
So I decided to go with a program which would obfuscate a string passed as parameter. But, while writting the very first lines of code to the project, I was in need of some comments and notes to keep myself informed about the point at which my work would stop before I would resume it later on. Then I ended up turning the whole project into the opposite of the concept I wanted to lampoon : documented, commented and organised code. I wondered about it for some days and, maybe this change is for good. I may use it as an example of what I consider the best coding practice in C.
I might try to create an obfuscated version of it once it’s finished, but I am definetely not sure about it anymore.