Concept
Esoteric programming language
Related concepts (13)
INTERCAL
The Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym (INTERCAL) is an esoteric programming language that was created as a parody by Don Woods and James M. Lyon, two Princeton University students, in 1972. It satirizes aspects of the various programming languages at the time, as well as the proliferation of proposed language constructs and notations in the 1960s. There are two maintained implementations of INTERCAL dialects: C-INTERCAL (created in 1990), maintained by Eric S.
Malbolge
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.
Brainfuck
Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in 1993 by Urban Müller. Notable for its extreme minimalism, the language consists of only eight simple commands, a data pointer and an instruction pointer. While it is fully Turing complete, it is not intended for practical use, but to challenge and amuse programmers. Brainfuck requires one to break commands into microscopic steps.
Turing tarpit
A Turing tarpit (or Turing tar-pit) is any programming language or computer interface that allows for flexibility in function but is difficult to learn and use because it offers little or no support for common tasks. The phrase was coined in 1982 by Alan Perlis in the Epigrams on Programming: 54. Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. In any Turing complete language, it is possible to write any computer program, so in a very rigorous sense nearly all programming languages are equally capable.
Pointer (computer programming)
In computer science, a pointer is an object in many programming languages that stores a memory address. This can be that of another value located in computer memory, or in some cases, that of memory-mapped computer hardware. A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the pointer. As an analogy, a page number in a book's index could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number and reading the text found on that page.
Syntax (programming languages)
In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the rules that define the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in that language. This applies both to programming languages, where the document represents source code, and to markup languages, where the document represents data. The syntax of a language defines its surface form. Text-based computer languages are based on sequences of characters, while visual programming languages are based on the spatial layout and connections between symbols (which may be textual or graphical).
Turing completeness
In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a model of computation, a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing-complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine (devised by English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing). This means that this system is able to recognize or decide other data-manipulation rule sets. Turing completeness is used as a way to express the power of such a data-manipulation rule set.
Lambda calculus
Lambda calculus (also written as λ-calculus) is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. It is a universal model of computation that can be used to simulate any Turing machine. It was introduced by the mathematician Alonzo Church in the 1930s as part of his research into the foundations of mathematics. Lambda calculus consists of constructing lambda terms and performing reduction operations on them.
Control flow
In computer science, control flow (or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an imperative programming language from a declarative programming language. Within an imperative programming language, a control flow statement is a statement that results in a choice being made as to which of two or more paths to follow.
Procedural programming
Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from imperative programming, based on the concept of the procedure call. Procedures (a type of routine or subroutine) simply contain a series of computational steps to be carried out. Any given procedure might be called at any point during a program's execution, including by other procedures or itself. The first major procedural programming languages appeared circa 1957–1964, including Fortran, ALGOL, COBOL, PL/I and BASIC. Pascal and C were published circa 1970–1972.