Fueled by Satan!

(I’ll explain the title in another posting later, but it has something to do with Speed Racer, Apple laptop power supplies, and the comic book character Spawn… )

Have you ever thought, “Gee, I’d like to stab myself repeatedly in the eye with a sharp object?”

If so, I have just the programming language for you: Malbolge.

Here is an overview of the language (from lscheffer.com):

Malbolge, for those not familiar with it, is a language designed to be difficult (or perhaps impossible - until recently, there was not even an informal argument showing Turing completeness) to program in. For example, the effect of any instruction depends on where it is located in memory (mod 94, of course), all instructions are self-modifying (according to a permutation table) and both the code and data pointers are incremented after every instruction, making it hard to re-use any code or data. There is no way to initialize memory except to one of the 8 instruction characters, there is no LOAD or STORE operator, and the only available memory operators (both of them) work in trinary and are designed to be opaque. The only control flow construct is an unconditional computed jump, which is also nearly worthless since there is no way (or certainly no obvious way) to set memory to anything except the 8 instruction characters.

Since many programmers learn by example, here’s the classic “Hello World” program in Malbolge…

 (=< `:9876Z4321UT.-Q+*)M'&%$H"!~}|Bzy?=|{z]KwZY44Eq0/{mlk**
 hKs_dG5[m_BA{?-Y;;Vb'rR5431M}/.zHGwEDCBA@98\6543W10/.R,+O<

How cool (or sick) is that?

12 May 2008 | Software | Comments