01 What is the esoteric programming language Malbolge?

Malbolge – Wikipedia

Malbolge is an esoteric programming language developed by Ben Olmstead in 1998. It was named after the eighth circle of hell from Dante’s Divina Commedia.

The peculiarity of Malbolge is that it was developed as the worst possible programming language, the most difficult to master. The first Malbolge program was created two years after the creation of the programming language. However, this program was not programmed by a human, but was calculated by a program using a search algorithm.

The reasons for the difficulty are:

  • commands are replaced by other commands after their execution. This makes it very difficult to convert loops into Malbolge.
  • the manipulation of data words is only possible in the ternary number system by means of right shift and another very unusual operator – the crazy function.
  • the encoding of a command by an ASCII character depends on the position of the command modulo 94.
  • Memory cells can only be initialized with one of eight possible ASCII values.

A Malbolge program consists of the ASCII characters +b(29e*j1VMEKLyC})8&m#~W>qxdRp0wkrUo[D7,XTcA\"lI.v%{gJh4G-=O@5`_3i<?Z';FNQuY]szf$!BS/|t:Pn6^Ha

or in a normalized form from the characters ijopv*/<

References

Malbolge – Wikipedia

Malbolge Specification (lscheffer.com)

Reference Malbolge Interpreter (lscheffer.com)