Why you should learn brainfuck (or: learn you a brainfuck for great good) | Hacker News Reader

Why you should learn brainfuck (or: learn you a brainfuck for great good)

skilldrick.co.uk

7 pointsskilldrick8 comments

Just went out and wrote a simple interpreter in 65 lines of Ruby. It's pretty slow but seems to be correct.

One thing you didn't mention is that the cells are supposed to be bytes, and thus increment and decrement need to be modulo 256. That may not be part of the actual definition but the sample programs I found all relied on it.

I also found it pretty funny that "apt-cache search brainfuck" returns a total of 3 interpreters in the Debian archive.

Yeah, you're right about the cells usually being bytes. I followed the "spec" far enough for it to be a compliant implementation, but its fairly quick-and-dirty, and will probably break on more advanced programs.

There's a really cool program that will convert programs written in an assembly-like language to brainfuck code.

http://inshame.blogspot.com/search/label/My%20Progs%3A%20Fuc...

I've been meaning to figure out how the program works, but the source code doesn't have a lot of comments so it isn't going so well.

Worth mentioning that the intent of brainfuck was to create a language with the smallest possible compiler.

Wikipedia claims [1] that most brainfuck compilers are < 200 bytes.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

Yes, I nearly put that in, but it didn't feel right. I've only given a very basic introduction to the language - the purpose of the blog was to teach the language rather than give its history.

Not quite - "Several brainfuck compilers have been made smaller than 200 bytes." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

I added this to the post in the end - on reflection I think you're right that it's worth mentioning.

This looks awesome, but god damn it! My todo list of things to play around with is growing faster than I can get to them.

Cheers :) Just give it half an hour...

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