Reader Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson, whose middle name means Glacier (now, how awesome is that!), sent along this chunk of C-code, straight from Iceland.

At first, this block of code made absolutely no sense to me. What can I say? My Icelandic is a bit rusty. But Stefán was nice enough to tell me that "faersla" should really be "færsla" (as C doesn’t allow international characters), which translates to "transaction or a part of a collection". So I hope that clears it up for the rest of you.

While we’re on the subject of C, I’m a firm believer that the single greatest thing to come from C is the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, where you can get a Missle Command Game whose source code looks like a "danger – radiation" symbol or a Flight Simulator shaped like an airplane. But there still is a fine line between writing code for an obfuscation contest and writing code for a business application. And although it may seem like a good idea at the time to use "v7" instead of "IterationHitCount," programmers like myself and Stefán would really appreciate the latter.

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