I strongly object to such obfuscated programming. How many beginners who subscribed to this forum could be misled into thinking "wow ! clever trick I've got to find an occasion to use it".

For this reason, I fully agree with Peter Schott, except that since someone might be forced to deal with lousy code, I think the offender should be lynched and his house burned down to the ground.

OK, if you want to play with brainteasers. However, beginners and even intermediate SQL'ers would benefit a lot by reading topnotch articles such as the Running Count by Jeff Moden. Then you end up with considerably more useful and practical knowledge.

At least, the rewrite by Robert Edgson was useful in demonstrating how to do things properly.

I remember from the early 1980's the great Obfuscated C Code contest. One in particular was formatted so that the listing looked like the pi number, only it was calculating the value of e.