Hacker News Reader

Comment by gghh | Hacker News Reader

Here a program that makes a for loop. From the comments: This program is something I thought to be impossible

http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-malbolge-995.html

"There is a claim that the '99 bottles of beer' program has been written in Malbolge. ( See http://99-bottles-of-beer.ls-la.net/m.html) The implication is that the program was doing looping, testing and printing. However, closer examination shows that the programmer was just doing a printf("") of the desired result using straight line code. Conceptually this is exactly the same as the 'hello world' example above."

http://www.lscheffer.com/malbolge.shtml

Hello Patient0, I didn't follow closely the issue, but reading the comment http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-malbolge-995.html... I formed the following opinion (speculation, since no much "subtitles" are provided): somebody wrote the 99-bottle program in Malbolge, actually doing printf("..."), which isn't that interesting after all. Then Hisashi Iizawa showed up and did the real thing (looping). Pedro Gimeno (the commenter I linked) did some analysis, and is convinced that the program does looping:

The program length is 22561 instructions; its output is 11459 bytes long. The ratio is less than 2 instructions per output byte, clearly insufficient <i>with Malbolge's limitations</i> for a program which simply outputs constant text.

This person also rewrote the program in what he calls "the normalized form", whatever that means (see comment for link to that code).

Ah I see. And he does say "(real loop version)" as a subtitle.

Awesome... It might GB of code to write some thing useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com