It's no surprise that Larry Wall himself indeed won the Obfuscated C Contest twice shortly before perl existed: once in 1986, the other in 1987.
I was looking at the
entries awhile ago. The 1986 one doesn't
compile with
gcc 2.95.2, and it makes me
dizzy to try and
understand, let alone
fix. The 1987 one was even more
obfuscated: a
Roman numeral conversion filter.