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Mar 30, 2021
“signed char lotte” is a computer program written by Brian Westley and the winner of the “Best Layout” award in the 1990
International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The cleverness of the text is staggering. Superficially it reads as an epistolary exchange between two (possibly former) lovers, Charlotte and Charlie. At the same, it is an executable piece of code whose action is thematically related to its story.
It has been argued that
code is not literature, and that it cannot be “read” in a straightforward way. “signed char lotte” is not a counterexample to this. The text is essentially a