What is the basis for the belief that there was a single person, who wrote the program for the psychologist, and perpetrated the compiler hack?
This could be a case that person B was innocently working on the curses-based questionnaire program for the psychologist. Person A was aware of this work and hacked the compiler to recognize and doctor that program (including squashing it down to one line), in addition to /sbin/login and possibly others.
I'm curious how the program managed to include various headers, like <curses.h>. That requires multiple lines. I'm thinking that the hacked compiler took the preprocessed original innocent program and then output it as one line not requiring any preprocessing directives. Not even necessarily to obfuscate it, but because the division into lines was gone at the point in the compiler where this was done; i.e. this was a manipulation of the token stream of the program, and the tokens were just converted back to text and output as one line.
Could even be that this was all done in the C preprocessor rather than the compiler proper, by recognition and replacement of token sequences. Though modern compilers integrate the preprocessing phases of the language, this sounds like it was in a classic Unix environment, in which cpp was still a separate program.
It is strange to think that someone with this level of skills was in a graduate program in psychology (as opposed to working in industry as an engineer).
> I'm curious how the program managed to include various headers,
Isn't it kind of obvious that this is a story, with some creative freedoms taken? The theme is an old one in hacker lore ("it was the compiler all along!"). While you are completely right this detail isn't important to the story.
This could be a case that person B was innocently working on the curses-based questionnaire program for the psychologist. Person A was aware of this work and hacked the compiler to recognize and doctor that program (including squashing it down to one line), in addition to /sbin/login and possibly others.
I'm curious how the program managed to include various headers, like <curses.h>. That requires multiple lines. I'm thinking that the hacked compiler took the preprocessed original innocent program and then output it as one line not requiring any preprocessing directives. Not even necessarily to obfuscate it, but because the division into lines was gone at the point in the compiler where this was done; i.e. this was a manipulation of the token stream of the program, and the tokens were just converted back to text and output as one line.
Could even be that this was all done in the C preprocessor rather than the compiler proper, by recognition and replacement of token sequences. Though modern compilers integrate the preprocessing phases of the language, this sounds like it was in a classic Unix environment, in which cpp was still a separate program.