Like I said, IOCCC entries are from some rather inventive programmers with way too much time on their hands.
And no, you never see such code in the real world.
> but it probably encourages beginners like me to look at programming a solution from a different, more complicated angle
Actually, we prefer simplicity.
It should be bleedingly obvious what code is doing, otherwise you spend far too much time on it.
Think how much time you've spent on those few lines already. Now imagine how long it would have taken you if the code had been written in the obvious way.
Now imagine there was a bug in the code (say it printed "Silver rings" rather than "Gold rings"), and how long it would take you to implement the change.
It ought to take you minutes and seconds, not hours and days.
