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→Obfuscations employed: changed 0 byte quine link to not be dead, and also changed it to instead point to the iocc page with e.g. remarks instead of the github (a github link can be found at the page) |
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Entries often employ strange or unusual tricks, such as using the [[C preprocessor]] to do things it was not designed to do (in some cases "spectacularly", according to ''Dr. Dobbs'',<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/code-finessing/193104882?pgno=2 |title=Code Finessing |magazine=[[Dr. Dobb's Journal]]|author=Spinellis, Diomidis |date=October 5, 2006 |access-date=2023-05-01}}</ref> with one entry creating an 11-bit [[Arithmetic logic unit|ALU]] in the C preprocessor<ref name="cpp_abuse">[https://www.ioccc.org/2004/vik2.hint IOCCC 2004 – Best Abuse of CPP]'' IOCCC. Retrieved 2023-05-01.</ref>), or avoiding commonly used constructs in the C programming language in favor of much more obscure ways of achieving the same thing.
Contributions have included source code formatted to resemble images, text, etc., after the manner of [[ASCII art]], preprocessor redefinitions to make code harder to read, and [[self-modifying code]]. In several years an entry was submitted that required a new definition of some of the rules for the next year, regarded as a high honor. An example is the world's shortest [[Quine (computing)|self-reproducing program]]. The entry was a program designed to output its own source code, and which had zero bytes of source code. When the program ran, it printed out zero bytes, equivalent to its source code.<ref>{{cite web|year=1994|title=iocc smr
In the effort to take obfuscation to its extremes, contestants have produced programs which skirt around the edges of C standards, or result in constructs which trigger rarely used code path combinations in compilers. As a result, several of the past entries may not compile directly in a modern compiler, and some may cause crashes.
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