March 2025 Archives

obfuscating Perl for fun and profit

(apologies for "promoting"(?) Perl obfuscation...)

Today I won a gift card at an in-office meeting with the following code. Challenge: print the numbers 1-100 in the most incomprehensible, inefficient way. My entry, edited for brevity:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.16;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
# plus 95 more of this
say join $/, @_;

Thinking about it more this evening, I came up with

$SIG {__DIE__} = sub { $_ = (pop)+0…

About Scott Lanning

user-pic I blog about Perl.