Having spent a lot of time meditating on it (as sofuture mentioned), it isn't "slightly obfuscated" so much as "stubbornly written like APL rather than C".
If you become inexplicably fascinated by that code and want help unraveling it, my contact info is in my profile.
I don't consider it noteworthy as a useful program under 2kloc (on modern hardware it usually just crashes, it's quite cavalier with pointer casting, and clearly a quick prototype either way), but it's like a pink space laser beam of insight about the APL mindset. Real APLs take more than a page, but not that much more. Eliding loops does that.
A lot of the IOCCC code is also delightfully perverse, too. Highly recommended.
Yeah, I realized that fact a little late. Relevant snippet from the link about that initial bit of code for J:
I showed this fragment to others in the hope of interesting someone competent in both C and APL to take up the work, and soon recruited Roger Hui, who was attracted in part by the unusual style of C programming used by Arthur, a style that made heavy use of preprocessing facilities to permit writing further C in a distinctly APL style.
Arthur's C is stubbornly unconventional, but often, he's got a point.
Also, the APL community seems to be pretty disjoint from the rest of CS (though Arthur is also a Lisper). I think it'd be mutually beneficial if the APLers and the MLers got together, in particular.
If you become inexplicably fascinated by that code and want help unraveling it, my contact info is in my profile.
I don't consider it noteworthy as a useful program under 2kloc (on modern hardware it usually just crashes, it's quite cavalier with pointer casting, and clearly a quick prototype either way), but it's like a pink space laser beam of insight about the APL mindset. Real APLs take more than a page, but not that much more. Eliding loops does that.
A lot of the IOCCC code is also delightfully perverse, too. Highly recommended.