How to build a calculator - not!

The wonderful Worse Than Failure (formerly wtf.com) has been running The Olympiad of Misguided Geeks at Worse Than Failure Programming Contest. It's an inspired idea: just how bad can you make a deliverable, while at the same time meeting the requirement.

Alex set contestants the task of building a calculator. Responses have included:

• Driving it all through optical character recognition - my personal favourite so far


• collecting inputs and simply sending them to CALC.EXE to do the work


• one built on an extensible framework that allows you to add new digits. You want to add apples and oranges? well now you can!

All too good to miss - you can find them here, so enjoy!