ed.bf: text editor in Brainfuck | Hacker News Reader

ed.bf: text editor in Brainfuck

github.com

147 pointsaartaka47 comments

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I love the proper formatting and explainer comments everywhere. Almost makes it seem normal.

I thought about stealing some of this code but I stopped when I saw the copyright notice

The project seems to use the “DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE“

WHAT IF I DO WHAT I DON'T WANT?

Am I then in violation?

You may be subject to litigation. Not worth the risk.

(true + false) = true

You’re good!

who force you to fo that? We should sue that guy!

We're committed to the values of Open Source, so you can use and repurpose our code as long as you are acting with accordance to the license

The WTFPL is legally equivalent to public domain. It’s even FSF approved. :)

I’m a big fan, and I use it a lot.

> It’s even FSF approved.

Not quite. The FSF says it's GPL compatible, but they do not recommend it:

> This is a lax permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

> We do not recommend this license. If you want a lax permissive license for a small program, we recommend the X11 license. A larger program usually ought to be copyleft; but if you are set on using a lax permissive license for one, we recommend the Apache 2.0 license since it protects users from patent treachery.

Source: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#WTFPL

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

This is funny but it cannot be called an implementation of `ed` because it only implements the tiniest fraction of ed. It doesn't have super basic commands like `a` (to append text), or `,p` (to print all lines), or any range support at all, let alone more advanced stuff like regular expressions.

So it's nowhere close to a POSIX-compliant implementation of ed, and not just for trivial reasons like that it cannot read/write files or execute shell commands.

Yes, it's neither a UNIX ed, nor a POSIX one, but that's a declared thing: it's an opinionated editor that purposefully diverges from ed.

https://github.com/bf-enterprise-solutions/os.bf

OS.bf is the project to get operating systems to an effective minimum of features. It's written entirely in Brainfuck, an industry standard in minimal, portable, architecture-independent, axiomatic technology

Oh man...

I've said it here before, brainfuck is the most forward-compatible language. If you want to write programs today that will still run 10, 100, 1000 years from now, brainfuck is the language capable of that guarantee.

And yet, I'm reluctant to call it the language of the future.

Indeed, Brainfuck is extremely powerful and portable! We're going to release our (Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions) "Why Brainfuck" manifesto soon, so stay tuned!

As long as there is a standard [1]...

[1] See https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck#Implementation_issues and https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck#Conventions for details.

There is also https://brainfuck.org/epistle.html, so we're pretty safe about the set of features that Brainfuck needs. At Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions, we're relying on a safe set of features any modern Brainfuck implementation provides, so we're safe and happy.

Oh well, TIL daniel b cristofani got the brainfuck.org domain. (The epistle was elsewhere when I first saw it.)

Yeah, unicode is a whole compatibility nightmare that I refuse to contemplate in the context of this shitpost. Don't quote me on this, but 30k 8-bit cells should be enough for anybody.

Luckily, you don't need Unicode, and we've endorsed the no-Unicode move in Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions. If one needs non-ASCII text, there always are ASCII encodings, like ArmASCII and romaji.

I clicked through to see if github had syntax highlighting for brainfuck, and wether it detected brainfuck in its graph that shows a project's language breakdown. I was not disappointed.

Microsoft's lawyers are busy

The fact that this was done in just 430ish lines of BF really illustrates some of BFs power that may be lost on others.

430 lines of overly verbose BF to boot. You could delete 1/3rd to 1/2 of them by simple tricks the author hasn't used for readability reasons.

It's not the worst language if you're willing to work within the constraints and frankly, more readable than a lot of C++. My own editor (written many years ago, no meta interpreter) was 113 characters.

Yes, there's always space for optimization in Brainfuck programs. We haven't used some of the optimization opportunities for readability, as you've said. But we might have missed some optimization spots too, so feel free to open an issue or pull request if you know how to fix that!

Also note that 430 lines is the code compliant with our bd.style: heavily commented, unambiguous, modifyable. You can always minify the code and it'll be some 1K commands, which is pretty small for a text editor.

>minify

I was waiting for the super optimising ed plugin.

It also illustrates the power and simplicity of ed

My company doesn't let us use brainfu*k due to a naughty language filter - has anyone ported this to befunge?

You can always call it Brainf* or BF—we do that when communicating with outside clients. Works alright, especially after they see how much power it adds to our programs.

Does your company also ban aussies? I've heard swearing is second nature to them.

This is gold though. They made a standard for brainfuck documentation.

https://github.com/bf-enterprise-solutions/bf.doc

AND a brainfuck style guide

https://github.com/bf-enterprise-solutions/bf.style

Glad to see you find it! We're commited to making Brainfuck community better, and our documentation and code style is part of this effort!

Utterly sick and downright twisted, but hilarious. Thanks.

I was going to ask how comments work but then I noticed comments are in [] so BF instructions (like , . etc) are not executed because all cells are zero. At least for the initial comments

Well, this is the ed man as u wish: https://tyyi.net/man2html/ed.html

Jeez, debugging this must have been so much fun.

Finally an enterprise solution for my brain fuck stack.

real Hacker News vibes

thanks for the mindfuck

I fucking love this source code

"Not being Ken Thompson is a struggle every working software engineer has to contend with." Funny. Also brainfuck always is intesting, hard for no other reason.

Some people just hate themselves. Really .. that's the only reason for something like this. But props for doing it, you are better hackers (old school variant) than me, bf-enterprise-solutions.

Thanks, we're glad you liked it! We don't hate anyone, though—we're commited to making good software with effective tools!

I must say, not being Ken Thomson is a real struggle in my career.

"bf-enterprise-solutions" ROFL

We had ChatGTP convert this from brainfuck to forth for readability.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT is too weak of an AI to work with Brainfuck code due to Brainfuck having too high-level of a semantics for an AI to grasp it. So yes, we have dedicated human coders in our company, and they are happy not to use hip AI do replace themselves!

Not surprised, the biggest difference is the name.

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