Weird Programming 2

The first part of the presentation will - similar to last years presentation - shed some light on the funny and sportive disciplines of the art of programming. Besides new examples in disciplines that were presented last year, like obfuscated programming and shortest code, core wars and demo coding are new in the agenda.

In core wars, we have a bunch of programmes running in parallel in the same memory. (This is a typical Von-Neumann machine with multitasking, but without memory protection.) The goal is to create a program that survives as long as possible, but at the same time quickly erases the other programs from memory.

Demo coders try to exploit a given, limited (and often legacy) hardware through the use of crafty software, and thus create unexpected effects and surprising results. On so-called demo partys, those programs are presented, and sometimes even some high valued prices are put up. The winners are e. G. 3D first person shooters in 64k and video clips with sound in 4k.

In the second part of the lessons, some creatively designed programming languages will be introduced. Especially, the two projects "Argh!" and "repsub" will be presented. Both of them evolved in the orbit of the CCC.

Argh! and its derivative Aargh! are somehow similar to BeFunge in that they are two dimensional virtual machines. Argh! and Aargh! were both adjusted to fit the special needs of customary unix text mode terminals.

Repsub has the high ideal to be a democratic programming environment. All memory cells enjoy equal rights, and can be processed highly parallel. It is mathematically proved that this pattern-matching and replacement based programming language is touring complete.

Finally, the third part will introduce some extra painful examples of production code. A fertile source for those are some commercially developed projects that were open-sourced afterwards. From time to time, those create the impression that the developers lost control of their own code. They now hope the community will help them to find the way out of their maintainance nightmare.

The CCC ErfA Group Ulm is planning to hold a shortest C coding contest on this Congress. We learned our lession from the last years contest, so the rules will be much simplified. Der erste Teil des Vortrages beleuchtet - ähnlich wie der letztjährige Vortrag - die spassig-sportlichen Disziplinen der Programmierkunst. Neben den bereits im letzten Jahr beleuchteten Disziplinen wie obfuscated Programming und shortest Code stehen auch Core Wars und Demo Coding auf dem Programm.