congratulations and all that.
But, IMHO, you /should/ have mentioned about the contest when you asked the question here.
[SNIP] i did brother... check the first mail when i asked u guys abt obfuscation. i did tell u abt the contest in that mail.
If you have first asked about obfuscation due to curiosity (or whatever), learned more about the whole thing & /then/ decided to take part in the contest, it sure is an achievement to celebrate. But otherwise /I/ would think it was slightly unfair... not that it matters what I think.
[SNIP] i hadnt heard of obfuscation before i heard of the comptt. now how do i get curiosity in something i never heard of. plus if u are thinking that i picked up some code directly from the mailing list and reproduced it there, u r wrong. the code came up on the list a day after the contest. if i had done that i wud have got the 1st prize , as the guy who did get the 1st prize did very similar things to those that were dicussed on the mail. what i did was somethiong diff.... i #defined & re #defined functions like scanf, printf, for , while etc etc as coke, pepsi, chicken, paneer etc etc.and to do a simple things like printing a msg ,i jumped 4 functions and did that. my code was supposed to take a string from a user and print it char by char. i had 100 lines of code for such a simple thing. hope matters are cleared now and HOPE U R CONVINCED THAT EVERY THING WAS /FAIR/... gurpreet