Hello experts,
As usual, this isn't a question as such, but rather a loose topic to generate a technical discussion about Access. All comments are welcome, but there is a challenge for the points. This time, I wanted something lighter, albeit not less technical.
Some of you might know (or remember) the "international obfuscated C code contest"; if not there is of course a Wikipedia page about it. I did incidentally learn a lot by studying some of the entries. This is similar on a much smaller scale. It's meant to be fun, although any sample or technique should actually work (so please test, review, and comment any full blown example). Simple ideas of possible obfuscation or anecdotes are also welcome. We might stumble upon a strange concept and develop a new original obfuscation together!
What do I mean by "obfuscation"? It's not simply poorly written or "shrouded" code, nor is it necessarily very complex. It can be something that looks as though it can't work but does; it can be a specially clever trick; it can be the blatant misuse of a feature to obtain a totally different effect; it can be using a bug as feature for some side effect; it can be anything, really... We will see.
Access being made of three distinct elements (the platform, Jet, and VB), there is potential for unexpected interactions. We routinely write SQL from VB; can we also write VB from a query? Forms and reports interact naturally with both; is there some unexpected way to use a control? VB code itself can certainly surprise us as well (not only by misusing line continuations and colons). Some queries definitely look entirely wrong... but return _something_. I must confess that in some previous threads in the series, especially the last one, I was sometimes thinking already about possible obfuscation.
One-liners, like "? CurrentDb!Table1.OpenRecor
dset()(1)"
, could be in a category of their own. Another would be for the most absurd usage of less known VB keywords, like "Imp" (my favourite). But the best is perhaps something that doesn't fit in any category...
Cheers!
Markus
(°v°)
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