Python obfuscation

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:41:52 -0800, Alex Martelli wrote:

>> Obfuscation has it's place.
> 
> What I think of this thesis is on a par of what I think of this way of
> spelling the possessive adjective "its" (and equally unprintable in
> polite company).

Aside: given that "it's" is "it is", how would you spell the possessive
case of it?

> If I could choose to eradicate only one of these two
> from the world, I'd opt for the spelling -- the widespread and totally
> unfounded belief in the worth of obfuscation is also damaging, but less
> so, since it only steals some time and energy from developers who (if
> they share this belief) can't be all that good anyway;-).

Not that I disagree with you about obfuscation in general, but I can think
of one particular usage case for obfuscation which is neither useless nor
morally suspect:

"Now listen carefully class, your homework for this week is to write a
program to blurgle a frobnitz. As a test of correctness, your program
must return the same results as the test function blurglise. Before you
get any clever ideas of copying the code from blurglise, keep in mind
firstly that the source code is obfuscated, and secondly that I am not an
idiot, I will recognise my own code if you try to pass it off as yours."



-- 
Steven.