Most Useful Obfuscation

Larry Wall
Unisys - System Development Group Santa Monica
9132 Kester Ave
Panorama City, CA 91402 USA

Judges' comments:

Try:

lwall | bc | lwall
input:  x*x
input:  c^2

Also try:

lwall | bc   and   lwall | cat

What we found amazing was how the flow of control was transferred between subroutines. Careful inspection will show that the array of pointers to functions named ‘vi’ refers to functions which seem to not be directly called. Even so, these pointers to functions are being used as an argument to signal. Can you determine why this is being done and how it is being exploited?

Some compilers complained about this file, so we changed: ‘=++I’ to ‘= ++I’.

Copyright © 1987, Landon Curt Noll & Larry Bassel. All Rights Reserved. Permission for personal, educational or non-profit use is granted provided this this copyright and notice are included in its entirety and remains unaltered. All other uses must receive prior permission in writing from both Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel.