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Malbolge () is a public-domain esoteric programming language invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno, the Malebolge. It was specifically designed to be almost impossible to use, via a counter-intuitive "crazy operation", base-three arithmetic, and self-altering code. It builds on the difficulty of earlier challenging esoteric languages (such as Brainfuck and Befunge) but exaggerates this aspect to an extreme degree, playing on the entangled histories of computer science and encryption. Despite this design, it is possible to write useful Malbol

Key facts

Programming language.discontinued
yes
Programming language.title
Malbolge
Programming language.screenshot
Malbolge cat program.png
Programming language.screenshot caption
A cat program in Malbolge
Programming language.paradigm
Esoteric, imperative, scalar, value-level
Programming language.designer
Ben Olmstead
Programming language.developer
Ben Olmstead
Programming language.released
1998
Programming language.influenced by
Brainfuck, INTERCAL (Tri-INTERCAL), Befunge
Programming language.influenced
Dis, Malbolge Unshackled
Programming language.File extensions
.mal, .mb
Programming language.typing
Untyped

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Show 4 more facts
influenced by
Befunge
inception
1998-01-01
publication date
1998-00-00
Commons category
Malbolge
Sources (1)

via Wikidata · CC0

~12 min read

Encyclopedic overview

15 sections
Contents
  • Programming in Malbolge
  • Example programs
  • Hello, World!
  • <code>cat</code> program
  • Design
  • Registers
  • Pointer notation
  • Memory
  • Instructions
  • ''Crazy'' operation <!--Name Crazy isn't found in source material, see talk page-->
  • Encipherment
  • Variants
  • See also
  • References
  • External links

Malbolge () is a public-domain esoteric programming language invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno, the Malebolge. It was specifically designed to be almost impossible to use, via a counter-intuitive "crazy operation", base-three arithmetic, and self-altering code. It builds on the difficulty of earlier challenging esoteric languages (such as Brainfuck and Befunge) but exaggerates this aspect to an extreme degree, playing on the entangled histories of computer science and encryption. Despite this design, it is possible to write useful Malbolge programs.

== Programming in Malbolge == Malbolge was very difficult to understand when it arrived, taking two years for the first Malbolge program to appear. The author himself has never written a Malbolge program. The first program was not written by a human being; it was generated by a beam search algorithm designed by Andrew Cooke and implemented in Lisp.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Malbolge” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.