This is my second of two winning entries in 2024 IOCCC (28th). This one took much less time than the other one. What was most special to me is that Landon said the IOCCC is honoured to present this entry! It's also noted that this entry in turns honours the Navajo Code Talkers - who deserve a great deal of respect.

The judges did something really cool this time - a video showing all the entries. Although I think YouTube ads ruin things I'll link to it anyway as I know Landon will appreciate it. One could always download it if they wished to not be interrupted: IOCCC Prize in yil-tas - Navajo Code Talkers translator.

For much more that I wrote see the entry on the IOCCC website: https://www.ioccc.org/2024/ferguson2/index.html.

A few comments of interest, fewer than the Oregon Trail parody one.

This code is also quite twisted. All (or if not all then almost all) the functions take a single parameter: a struct a *. They also return a char *. These facts might not seem very significant but they're quite significant.

The reason the functions are the same signature is so they can be in a function pointer array (and as I recall that is inside the same struct). The char * return also acts as an int in some cases. I don't think I need to explain how this would work. But what is really sneaky is that each function is called by an anonymous struct. This means that I can have a different order of the array in each function, so that in one function the first element of the function pointer array might be one function but in the others it is something else entirely! There are a lot of other extremely twisted things. There is even code I cannot myself untangle.

Did you know you can do maths on strings? It's kind of cheating but it's possible. For instance, what does: c = calloc(1**"0"-47, sizeof *c) do? Or what about: F((c=((~~!!~!9u|2**"9"-15u/ *"0"-2u)<<~~!~!~9u),c&=9u,&(struct a){ .l=1, .s=a[c],.v= { &w, &w } } )); ?

Okay so there is more to that line but I refer to the arithmetic parts. There is code that looks wrong but is not. It looks like it will go out of bounds but if you 'fix' it it will actually then go out of bounds. Here's another fun one: s=z+-*"1"-*"1"- -97,L=putchar(!s&&isupper(a->x[0**"z"])?a->a->c[s]:tolower(a->a->c[s]));.

One more and then you'll have to see for yourself: for (z = 2/ *"z", s=1+0**"1"; z[a->x]; ++z). The hilarious thing about this one is if you remove one of the spaces it turns the code into a comment! That means a beautifier has to be very careful lest it destroy the code!

I did try explaining the code but a lot of it I could not do very easily. Some code I tried to decouple and I could not do it. If one wishes to see that commented code: deobfus.c.