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PEP 308 - ternary operator

Wolfgang Strobl wks000 at t-online.de
Sun Feb 16 15:29:35 EST 2003 
Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com>:

>Wolfgang Strobl wrote:
>
>> I'm not quite shure whether this is old news or not, but I haven't
>> seen
>> the following mentioned here.
>> 
>> Jason Orendorffs entry, a tiny version of "Collossal Cave",
>> 
>> http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2001/jason.c resp http://www.ioccc.org/
>> 
>> got a "best of show" award in the latest International Obfuscated C
>> Code Contest.  IMHO, a great part of its obfuscation is owed to Cs
>> ternary operator. For example, the state machine that runs the game is
>> a single loop evaluating a single expression composed of a rats nest
>> of
>> thirty six  ?: and thirty six logical ors - without a single bracket!
>
>So?  Do you really think people would write such things in production
>code?

Frankly, I don't know. Probably not.  

Counter question: do you really believe that it needs a sequence of 36
ternaries do get an incomprehensible expression? I don't think so.
Quick,without the help of a compiler: what does 
printf("%d",c-a?b*c-6?c:a+b*c-1:2); 
print, for int a=1,b=2,c=3;? 

>
>Any structure _can_ be used to obfuscate.  

But some fit the job better than others. :-)

 
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