Seonghoon Kang
kang.seonghoon@mearie.org
make kang
echo "full spelling of an English cardinal numeral less than a quadrillion" | ./kang
echo Nineteen hundred and eighty-four | ./kang
echo uno | ./kang
echo trois | ./kang
echo fier | ./kang
echo "shest'" | ./kang
The judges were able to appreciate the Indo-European language family relation by making this entry successfully recognize some French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish numerals.
Also worth mentioning is this entry’s ability to understand the colloquial year numbers of the last millennium.
We’ve added a linefeed to the print format for convenience.
This short program reads a spelt number (e.g. forty-two
) and writes a
corresponding decimal number (e.g. 42
). Too long for one-liners, alas,
but it still qualifies as a short program as it has less than 0x100 bytes.
It accepts a variety of spelt numbers:
zero
.forty-two
and forty two
are same.
So does period or comma.TWO
, Two
, two
are same.one
and a
are interchangeable: one hundred
and a hundred
are same.and
is optional: one hundred twenty-three
and one hundred and twenty-three
are same.billion
is 109 and trillion
is
1012.It does not accept some spelt numbers, which I found mostly irrelevant:
hundred
, thousand
etc. do not work.one million million
does not work. Get used to one trillion
!This program is quite portable, only requiring the following:
int main(int, int)
should be accepted by the linker. (Original
version only)char
should be at least 8 bits long (as dictated by the standard), int
should be at least 32 bits long, long long
should be at least 64 bits long.char
should wrap around, if your char
is unsigned.The design of the program explicitly allows for EOF
which does not equal to -1
(it has to be negative per the standard) and both signed and unsigned char
,
for example. Furthermore it is endian-independent.
Many obfuscations used are typical for standard IOCCC entries:
main
function are reused as normal variables.?:
ternary operator and ||
short-circuiting operator.for
loops and nothing else.~-a
instead of a-1
,
~a?...:...
instead of a!=-1?...:...
, etc.,
) for multiple statements. The number of them is
minimized, however, as it is too easy to (ab)use them.n["string"]
instead of "string"[n]
. Both are fine for this program but
I went to the former just for fun.Other obfuscations are more subtle:
"1+DIY/.K430x9G(kC["
is 18 bytes long, but actually 19 bytes
including the final null character are used.two
hundred and three
, it actually writes 0x203 as hexadecimal.n
) have dual uses.main
-er within it!But the most important obfuscation is the clever construction of lookup table. The program uses 11 different characters required for recognizing 22 lexemes:
zero one tw- th(i)r- fo(u)r- fi- six-
seven- eigh- nin- ten eleven twelve
hundred(s) thousand(s) million(s) billion(s) trillion(s)
a and -teen -ty
So that they are internally represented as like:
r n tw- tr- fr- f- s-
sn- g- nn- tn ln twl
nr(s) tsan(s) lln(s) blln(s) trlln(s)
a an -tn -ty
The stemmer recognizes the longest matching prefix, so every lexeme can be
recognized by at most three characters (e.g. trl
instead of trlln
). This is
also handy for ignoring plurals. But that would make that the table does not fit
in the printable byte—112 is already almost 27!
The trick is to use octal; three characters (a
, b
and g
) are interpreted
as sequences of two characters (ny
, nn
and nw
respectively). Asides from
a smaller lookup table, it has many good consequences:
a
and and
share the common prefix, ny
, and can be discarded
altogether. Note that ny
itself does not appear from other entries.thousand
is interpreted as tsan
, which is equivalent to tfyn
in the
octal scheme. As it is the only entry with tf
prefix, it can be shorten by
one character.Having said this important trick, other details should be relatively easier to follow. The order of lookup table, for example, is very important, and the biggest constant 6177 is not arbitrarily chosen.
The cleaner (size-optimized) version of this program was originally published in my website in July 2011. Sun Park and others have reviewed it and let me aware of possible improvements. I’d also like to thank Seo Sanghyeon for proof-reading remarks.
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Leo Broukhis, Simon Cooper, Landon Curt Noll
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