The idea by itself is nothing new and pretty much any novice C programmer eventually stumbles across it. Famously, the original Bourne Shell was written in a variant of ALGOL68, fed through a C compiler using macro based translation[1][2], which helped spark the idea for the IOCCC[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_shell#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Cod...