An interesting ProgrammingLanguage. It is very easy to learn, but can get extremely confusing.

There is someone in my head,
and it is not me.

-- Pink Floyd, Brain damage

The language has 8 different commands which follow, and included is their purpose. They use a nameless pointer to manipulate an array of (typically) 30000 cells, all initially set to 0. The pointer starts at the left end of the array.

+

Increment the value of the current cell by 1

-

Decrement the value of the current cell by 1

.

Print the current cell as a character to standard output stdout(3)

,

Read a value from standard input to the current cell (these two use ASCII)stdin(3)

>

Move the pointer to the next cell

<

Move the pointer to the previous cell

[

Start of a loop. This essentially is a while loop which will keep iterating until the current cell equals zero. ie. while(x) { }

]

End of the while loop. Anything between these two language constructs will get executed whilst the while loop executes.

As they say about Perl: There are many ways to skin a Camel This also holds true for Brainf*ck.

Standard Brainf*ck thinks of every variable as an integer with a range of 0 through to 255. A variable in Brainf*ck is used by the < and > instructions. For example, the code

• +>++++<

would mean the following:

• Increment the current variable by 2
• Move to the next variable
• Increment this variable by 4
• Move to the previous variable

After this bit of code, the variable we are currently referencing has a value of 2, and the next variable has a value of 4.

Examples

Here's a HelloWorld program

• +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.
• ++++++++++++++>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
• +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.+++++++..+++.>++++++++++++++
• +++++++++++++++++.<<.>.+++.------.--------.

+++++++++++++.

A big archive of brainfuck programs and implementations is at http://esoteric.sange.fi/brainfuck/ . There's more info about the language on this page.

Notes

The language has the simple specification to ignore any character in the program source code which is not a valid brainfuck command. This allows us to put comments in our code, as long as we make sure we do not accidentally use one of the language constructs in our comments.

GerwinVanDeSteeg is planning on writing his own Compiler and an Interpreter for this language sometime in the near future. There are some available already on the WorldWideWeb, to find one, try Google.

I've just written one. Insomnia has its own imperatives. Here you go: brainfux0r.ml. It is written in Ocaml?. It has a compiler (it compiles to C), an imperative interpreter and a functional interpreter. The functional interpreter has an infinite Turing tape as memory. I wrote and rewrote this program several times to try out various Ocaml features. (I'm following the advice on StuffToCode.) --GlynWebster

CategoryProgrammingLanguages, CategoryObfuscatedProgrammingLanguages