[t-3]

That's the "Whitney style". See: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

It's writing C in array-language style rather than intentional obfuscation.

[frankjr]

Thanks. I'm now reading this where people are trying to explain what happened in the ref/ directory.

https://github.com/kparc/ksimple/blob/main/a.c

[dcuthbertson]

Thanks for that link. The comments there help a lot. If I understand them, this is a minimal implementation of K with a lot of limitations, such as:

"the only supported atom/vector type is 8bit integer, so beware of overflows"

Still, it's fascinating how an interpreter can be written with such a small amount of code.

[tromp]

An interpreter for BLC, including tokenizing, parsing, and evaluation, can be written in as few as 29 bytes of BLC (and 650 bytes of C).

[tasuki]

John, do tell more about BLC please!

[tromp]

There's more at http://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html including the LispNYC talk I gave last year.

[tasuki]

Thank you!

[im3w1l]

Personally I believe in a sort of "evolution" of software that operates independently of intentions of the programmers.

I can totally believe that he didn't intentionally obfuscate it, but its incomprehensibility made it harder for other people to make a knockoff and thats why it survived and became successful.