ok, but if you did this in an inteview I was giving I would say "clever, but you didn't get the job". Mainly because you missed the point of the interview.
We have a guy who joined recently who constantly tries to be as clever as possible when writing his code. He ignores established patterns and conventions because he knows better. He does some cool stuff. Really cool stuff.
He's so far bounced thorugh 3 different teams, I don't think he'll be with us long.
I want proof that you normally write readable code, but that you can pull the above off is impressive and I'm interested. Once in a while I need people who can work with weird problems. (More than once I've traced a production bug to something in gcc - this happens about once every 10 years on a project with 200 developers, but it happens and someone needs to be able to trace such things down)
But hey, for my job I recently had to make a fully interactive 3D shopping cart using nothing but CSS. It required some truly diabolical, unreadable code to do things like state management and cart total calculations with nothing but stylesheets. Every once in a while, weird code has real value! And it keeps me from getting bored.
We have a guy who joined recently who constantly tries to be as clever as possible when writing his code. He ignores established patterns and conventions because he knows better. He does some cool stuff. Really cool stuff.
He's so far bounced thorugh 3 different teams, I don't think he'll be with us long.