Best RFC Obfuscation: Ron McFarland 7941 Fawncreek Drive Cincinnati, Ohio 45249 USA Judges' comments: To use: make rcm ./rcm < rfc1951.gz Also try: ./rcm < rfc1952.gz And for more information try: ./rcm < rfc1951.gz ./rcm < rfc1952.gz For a good noop try: gzip -c < rcm.c | ./rcm Selected notes from the author: Except for some silly requirements regarding input validation, CRC checking, and similar unimportant fluff, this program is a fully compliant RFC1951/RFC1952 (GNU Gzip) file uncompressor. Feed it a "gzip" compressed file on standard input, and it will write the fully uncompressed original file to standard output. ObJustifications for this entry: The Design Trade-off Argument "The 184 characters worth of defines in the build file have been carefully offset by 184 redundant and unecessary '{', '}', and ';' characters in the source file." The Design Review Argument "Using only 216 characters out of a maximum of 256, the build file meets and actually exceeds specification." The Program Metrics Argument "The program source is less than 3,100 characters in length and uncompresses file `emacs-19.34b.tar.gz' in about 130 seconds on my HP 9000/735. The now obsolete source file `inflate.c' from the GNU gzip source tree is 31,613 characters in length and uncompresses the emacs distribution file in slightly under 25 seconds. Thus: 3100 / 130 = 23.85 -vs- 31613 / 25 = 1264.52 which represents a better than 530% improvement in the ratio of source file size to execution time." The Whining Programmer's Argument "The inflate algorithm requires that over 400 characters worth of constants and tables be defined. Which means the program itself had to be squeezed down to about 1,100 IOCCC countable bytes."