Anyone working in a major company must have been hit by some ‘funny’ mail from a coworker that helps everyone gets through the day. No different at my office — at one point all engineers have been challenged to write the shortest code in C that prints all prime numbers (and only prime numbers) less than a hundred each on separate line.

This is an interesting brain-teaser so posting it here so others may choose to think about it while their code’s compiling.

Of course, a ‘C program’ needs not to be taken too seriously — depending on not too far fetched undefined behaviours of given implementation is all right (but please do not use system or exec family of calls; not that I can see how that would help).

By the way, if you’re interested in how this challenge looks solved in Rust, I’ve described that as well.

It has been a long time since my last entry, so inspired by Adriaan de Groot’s entry, I decided to write something about 0, NULL and upcoming nullptr.

I will try to be informative and explain what the whole buzz is about and then give my opinion about nullptr. Let us first inspect how a null pointer can be donated in C and C++.

Sitting in a dark office, after swearing for hours at ATI video cards I noticed time on my computer was incorrect. ‘No problem,’ I thought as I started typing ntpdate. That’s where it struck me that our beloved IT department had blocked most of the Internet. Checking the time on a watch or a mobile phone was not an option — I had neither — nor was looking at GKrellM on another PC — that’s lame.

‘I wish there was a NTP-over-HTTP protocol’ I sighed. And then I realised there was…