JAPH – Awesome Code Obfuscation

by Martin on 6/06/2010

Every so often I stumble across something that really just leaves me dumbfounded. The only valid response seems to be “… Fascinating!”

The latest is this clever JAPH consisting solely of keywords.

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not exp log srand xor s qq qx xor
s x x length uc ord and print chr
ord for qw q join use sub tied qx
xor eval xor print qq q q xor int
eval lc q m cos and print chr ord
for qw y abs ne open tied hex exp
ref y m xor scalar srand print qq
q q xor int eval lc qq y sqrt cos
and print chr ord for qw x printf
each return local x y or print qq
s s and eval q s undef or oct xor
time xor ref print chr int ord lc
foreach qw y hex alarm chdir kill
exec return y s gt sin sort split

In short; The Perl community has a meme going where you are supposed to write a snippet returning the String “just another perl hacker” in the most convoluted and obfuscated way possible.

This gem does exactly that. It’s beautiful in that there are no Strings in there, only valid Perl keywords, and it’s perfectly justified. For some reason this kind of useless stuff really appeals to me at a deep level. I fear a couple of hours may be lost to trying to create a clever JAAH.

This was posted earlier on ria.creuna.com.

There is 1 comment in this article:

  1. 7/06/2010Lawrie says:

    Wow – as you say this is fascinating.
    If the use of just keywords wasn’t enough – the text justification blows me away!

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