Two Esoteric Programming Languages, One Interpreter

Many of you will have heard of the esoteric programming language Brainf**k_. It’s an example language that’s nearly impossible to use because it’s too simple. It’s basically a Turing computer in code – you can essentially put characters into an array, read them out, increment, decrement, and branch. The rest is up to you. Good luck!

What could be worse? Befunge, a language that parses code not just left-to-right or top-to-bottom, but in any direction depending on the use of ^, v, >, and <. (We love the way that GOTO 10 looks like a garden path in the example.)

Uniting the two, [rsheldiii] brings us BrainFunge, a Brainf**k_ interpreter written in Befunge. And surprisingly, the resulting write-up sheds enough light on both of the esoteric programming languages that they make a little bit of sense. If you try to read along, you’ll definitely be helped out by Esolang Park, which was new to us, and accommodates the non-traditional parsing while displaying the contents of the stack.

If you get a taste of the esoteric, and you find that you’d like a little more, we have a great survey of some of the oddest for you. After cutting your teeth on Befunge, for example, we bet you’ll be ready for Piet.



Two Esoteric Programming Languages, One Interpreter
Source: Manila Flash Report

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