Despite its unfortunate name, brainf#ck is truly remarkable in its extreme minimalism programming language.

Conceived by Urban Mueller, brainf#ck defines tiny, eight instruction command set, which is however sufficient to compute anything computable. It is a practical variation of a Turing Machine, developed by Alan Turing in 1936 in an attempt to formally define what we now refer to as an algorithm.

In other words, rephrasing an old saying -

If you can't do it in brainf#ck, it isn't worth doing.

Interpreter

Here is a moderately-optimizing™ brainf#ck interpreter written in portable C by yours truly (last updated in July 2004):

• bff-1.0.3.1.tar.gz
• bff.c and readme

Current version is about 2 times faster than its predecessor, which was already faster than other C-based interpreters I looked at. Given this mind-boggling speed improvement version 1.0.3 was promoted from slightly to the moderately optimizing interpreter.

Should it fail to compile or run on your platform, please kindly let me know I will fix it up as time permits.

CORRECTION (August 2009) - Oleg Mazonka cooked up an interpreter that beats bff hands down. Check it out here, you want the bff4lnr version.

Programs

Here is a couple of brainf#ck programs I find particularly amusing:

• mandelbrot.b - a Mandelbrot fractal render by Erik Bosman
• random.b - a random number generator by Daniel B. Cristofani

Latter is not just staggeringly short with its 110 instructions, it is also twice as geeky because it's based on rule 30 cellular automata, Stephen Wolfram's pride and joy.

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