Brainfuck

What a complex program programmed in brainfuck looks like

System/Programming

Tier 11

Overview brainfuck (also brainf*ck, brainf*** etc) is an esoteric programming language written by Urban Müller in 1993 to see how small of a compiler he could make. An esoteric language is a programming language deigned to experiment with weird ideas, as a joke, or to be as confusing as possible, in the case of brainfuck there are only 8 commands you can use. brainfuck is the most famous esoteric programming language and has inspired the creation of a lot of similar languages. Language overveiw brainfuck works by using an array of memory cells and using the 8 different commands, you can manipulate the values in the cells to perform calculations and output ascii characters. The 8 commands are as follows: > move the memory pointer to the left < move the memory pointer to the right + increase the value in the memory cell - decrease the value in the memory cell . output the value in the memory cell , input a character into a memory cell [ start a loop ] end a loop For example, here is the program to print out 'Hello world!' ++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++. As you can see, the programming language is very diffiicult to use for anything other than simple tasks as the programs get very large, very quickly. Some programs that came out of brainfuck are BFFuck, a program that covnverts normal program into the respective brainfuck code, Grin, an Extension of brainfuck that adds 43 new commands to the original brainfuck, and Ook! , which is brainfuck but the instructions are all orangutang words. For more on esoteric programming languages, see The esoteric file archive.