The Brainfuck Programming Language

Published on 23 August 2018 (Updated: 22 December 2023)

Welcome to the Brainfuck page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

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Description

Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in 1992, and notable for its extreme minimalism. As people have implemented more and more ridiculous programs with the language, it has become relatively well-known over the years. Nowadays some see it as the ultimate coding challenge to create something useful in Brainfuck.

At the core of the language is a more-than-compact instruction set, comprising of a whopping eight instructions. Brainfuck uses a machine model consisting of an infinite list of one-byte cells, an instruction pointer, and a cell pointer. The instructions can be used to interact with this environment: < and > move the cell pointer, + and - increment or decrement the value of the cell at the current pointer, and [ and ] denote a loop.

A loop only starts when the value of the current cell is non-zero, otherwise execution jumps to the end of the loop. Likewise, a loop ends when the value is zero, otherwise the program jumps to the beginning of the loop. The remaining two instructions, , and . read one character from the input into the current cell and write one character from the current cell to the output, respectively. That's it!

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