Best of show: Jack Applin Jack Applin Hewlett-Packard 3404 E. Harmony Rd Ft. Collins, CO 80525 USA Compile and execute with no argument, if you can! This entry is by far the most unusual abuse of the C preprocessor that we have received thus far. Nearly all of the real work is done in the preprocessor! When we compiled applin.c on an Amdahl 5890-300E, we found that it spent over 75 minutes in the System V C preprocessor! Besides showing that the standard System V cpp is slow, it showed that it contained a memory usage problem. The applin.c only uses 29 different preprocessor symbols (besides and yet the preprocessor ran out of space! The GNU C preprocessor took less than 45 seconds to perform the 2nd pass on the Amdahl 5890-300E. But due to the ANSI-ness of GNU cpp (v. 1-21), it was not able to cleanly substitute a symbol that began with a '#'. Clearly the GNU C preprocessor is faster. A smaller version of applin.c can be found in zsmall.c. Your machine may have an easier time with this program. See the Makefile for details. Copyright (c) 1988, Landon Curt Noll & Larry Bassel. All Rights Reserved. Permission for personal, educational or non-profit use is granted provided this this copyright and notice are included in its entirety and remains unaltered. All other uses must receive prior permission in writing from both Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel.