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Concept
Malbolge
Summary
Malbolge (mælˈboʊldʒ) 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.
Malbolge was very difficult to understand when it arrived. It took 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.
Later, Lou Scheffer posted a cryptanalysis of Malbolge and provided a program to copy its input to its output. He also saved the original interpreter and specification after the original site stopped functioning, and offered a general strategy of writing programs in Malbolge as well as some thoughts on its Turing completeness.
Olmstead believed Malbolge to be a linear bounded automaton. There is a discussion about whether one can implement sensible loops in Malbolge—it took many years before the first non-terminating one was introduced. A correct 99 Bottles of Beer program, which deals with non-trivial loops and conditions, was not announced for seven years; the first correct one was by Hisashi Iizawa in 2005. Hisashi Iizawa et al. also proposed a guide for programming in Malbolge for the purpose of obfuscation for software protection.
In 2020, GitHub user kspalaiologos made a working Lisp interpreter in Malbolge Unshackled.
This program displays "Hello, World".
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Official source
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