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Ob- /ob/, pref. Obligatory. A piece of {netiquette} acknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing particularly to do with sex, the author may append 'ObSex' (or 'Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of great {winnitude} when one's Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.
Obfuscated C Contest n. (in full, the 'International Obfuscated C Code Contest', or IOCCC) An annual contest run since 1984 over Usenet by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how not to code in C. This relatively short and sweet entry might help convey the flavor of obfuscated C:
obi-wan error /oh´bee·won' er'@r/, n. [RPI, from off-by-one and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in Star Wars] A loop of some sort in which the index is off by one. 1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from 1. 2. A kind of {off-by-one error}. See also {zeroth}.
Objectionable-C n. Hackish take on "Objective-C", the name of an object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the better-known C++ (it is used to write native applications on the NeXT machine). Objectionable-C uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method calls, and (like many such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the {Right Thing} without actually doing so.
obscure adj. Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply total incomprehensibility. "The reason for that last crash is obscure." "The find(1) command's syntax is obscure!" The phrase moderately obscure implies that something could be figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The construction obscure in the extreme is the preferred emphatic form.
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