Esoteric programming language

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An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a programming language designed to test the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, as software art, as a hacking interface to another language (particularly functional programming or procedural programming languages), or as a joke. The use of the word esoteric distinguishes them from languages that working developers use to write software. The creators of most esolangs do not intend them to be used for mainstream programming, although some esoteric features, such as visuospatial syntax, [1] have inspired practical applications in the arts. Such languages are often popular among hackers and hobbyists.[ citation needed ]

Contents

Usability is rarely a goal for designers of esoteric programming languages; often their design leads to quite the opposite. Their usual aim is to remove or replace conventional language features while still maintaining a language that is Turing-complete, or even one for which the computational class is unknown.

History

The earliest, and still the canonical example of an esoteric programming language, is INTERCAL, [2] designed in 1972 by Don Woods and James M. Lyon, who said that their intention was to create a programming language unlike any with which they were familiar. [3] [4] It parodied elements of established programming languages of the day such as Fortran, COBOL and assembly language.

For many years, INTERCAL was represented only by paper copies of the INTERCAL manual. Its revival in 1990 as an implementation in C under Unix stimulated a wave of interest in the intentional design of esoteric computer languages.

In 1993, Wouter van Oortmerssen created FALSE, a small stack-oriented programming language with syntax designed to make the code inherently obfuscated, confusing and unreadable. Its compiler is only 1024 bytes in size. [5] This inspired Urban Müller to create an even smaller language, the now-infamous Brainfuck, which consists of only eight recognized characters. Along with Chris Pressey's Befunge (like FALSE, but with a two-dimensional instruction pointer), Brainfuck is now one of the best-supported esoteric programming languages, with canonical examples of minimal Turing tarpits and needlessly obfuscated language features. Brainfuck is related to the P′′ family of Turing machines.

Common features

While esoteric programming languages differ in many ways, there are some common traits that characterize many languages, such as parody, minimalism, and the goal of making programming difficult. [6] Many esoteric programming languages, such as brainfuck, and similar, use single characters as commands, however, it is not uncommon for languages to read line by line like conventional programming languages.

Unique data representations

Conventional imperative programming languages typically allow data to be stored in variables, but esoteric languages may utilize different methods of storing and accessing data. Languages like Brainfuck and Malbolge only permit data to be read through a single pointer, which must be moved to a location of interest before data is read. Others, like Befunge and Shakespeare, utilize one or more stacks to hold data, leading to a manner of execution akin to Reverse Polish notation. Finally, there are languages which explore alternative forms of number representation: the Brainfuck variant Boolfuck only permits operations on single bits, while Malbolge and INTERCAL variant TriINTERCAL replace bits altogether with a base 3 ternary system. [7]

Unique instruction representations

Esoteric languages also showcase unique ways of representing program instructions. Some languages, such as Befunge and Piet, represent programs in two or more dimensions, with program control moving around in multiple possible directions through the program. [8] [ page needed ] This differs from conventional languages in which a program is a set of instructions usually encountered in sequence. Other languages modify instructions to appear in an unusual form, often one that can be read by humans with an alternate meaning to the underlying instructions. Shakespeare achieves this by making all programs resemble Shakespearian plays. Chef achieves the same by having all programs be recipes. [7] Chef is particularly notable in that some have created programs that successfully function both as a program and as a recipe, demonstrating the ability of the language to produce this double meaning. [9]

Difficulty to read and write

Many esoteric programming languages are designed to produce code that is deeply obfuscated, making it difficult to read and to write. [10] The purpose of this may be to provide an interesting puzzle or challenge for program writers: Malbolge for instance was explicitly designed to be challenging, and so it has features like self-modifying code and highly counterintuitive operations. [10] On the other hand, some esoteric languages become difficult to write due to their other design choices. Brainfuck is committed to the idea of a minimalist instruction set, so even though its instructions are straightforward in principle, the code that arises is difficult for a human to read. INTERCAL's difficulty arises as a result of the choice to avoid operations used in any other programming language, which stems from its origin as a parody of other languages. [10]

Parody and spoof

One of the aims of esoteric programming languages is to parody or spoof existing languages and trends in the field of programming. [10] For instance, the first esoteric language INTERCAL began as a spoof of languages used in the 1960s, such as APL, Fortran, and COBOL. INTERCAL's rules appear to be the inverse of rules in these other languages. [11] However, the subject of parody is not always another established programming language. Shakespeare can be viewed as spoofing the structure of Shakespearean plays, for instance. The language Ook! is a parody of Brainfuck, where Brainfuck's eight commands are replaced by various orangutan sounds like "Ook. Ook?" [7]

Examples

Befunge

Befunge allows the instruction pointer to roam in multiple dimensions through the code. For example, the following program displays "Hello World" by pushing the characters in reverse order onto the stack, then printing the characters in a loop which circulates clockwise through the instructions >, :, v, _, ,, and ^.

"dlroW olleH">:v^,_@

There are many versions of Befunge, the most common being Befunge-93, which is named as such because it was released in 1993. [12]

Binary lambda calculus

Binary lambda calculus is designed from an algorithmic information theory perspective to allow for the densest possible code with the most minimal means, featuring a 29-byte self interpreter, a 21-byte prime number sieve, and a 112-byte Brainfuck interpreter. [13]

Brainfuck

Brainfuck is designed for extreme minimalism and leads to obfuscated code, with programs containing only eight distinct characters. The following program outputs "Hello, world!": [14] 

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.

All characters other than +-<>,.[] are ignored.

Chicken

Chicken has just three tokens, the word "chicken", " " (the space character), and the newline character. The compiler interprets the number of "chickens" on a line as an opcode instruction which it uses to manipulate data on a stack. A simple chicken program can contain dozens of lines with nothing but the word "chicken" repeated countless times. [15] Chicken was invented by Torbjörn Söderstedt who drew his inspiration for the language from a parody of a scientific dissertation. [16] [17] [18]

Chef

Chef is a stack-oriented programming language created by David Morgan-Mar, designed to make programs look like cooking recipes. [19] Programs consist of a title, a list of variables and their data values, and a list of stack manipulation instructions. [20] A joking design principle states that "program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious", and Morgan-Mar notes that an example "Hello, World!" program with "101 eggs" and "111 cups oil" would produce "a lot of food for one person." [20] [21]

FRACTRAN

A FRACTRAN program is an ordered list of positive fractions together with an initial positive integer input . The program is run by multiplying the integer by the first fraction in the list for which is an integer. The integer is then replaced by and the rule is repeated. If no fraction in the list produces an integer when multiplied by , the program halts. FRACTRAN was invented by mathematician John Conway. [22]

GolfScript

Programs in GolfScript, a language created for code golf, consist of lists of items, each of which is pushed onto the stack as it is encountered, with the exception of variables which have code blocks as their value, in which case the code is executed. [23]

INTERCAL

INTERCAL, short for "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym", was created in 1972 as a parody to satirize aspects of the various programming languages at the time. [4]

JSFuck

JSFuck is an esoteric programming style of JavaScript, where code is written using only six characters: [, ], (, ), !, and +. Unlike Brainfuck, which requires its own compiler or interpreter, JSFuck is valid JavaScript code, meaning JSFuck programs can be run in any web browser or engine that interprets JavaScript. [24] [25] It has been used in a number of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks on websites such as eBay due to its ability to evade cross-site scripting detection filters. [26]

LOLCODE

LOLCODE is designed to resemble the speech of lolcats. The following is the "Hello World" example:

HAI CAN HAS STDIO? VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!" KTHXBYE

While the semantics of LOLCODE is not unusual, its syntax has been described as a linguistic phenomenon, representing an unusual example of informal speech and internet slang in programming. [27]

Malbolge

Malbolge (named after the 8th circle of Hell) was designed to be the most difficult and esoteric programming language. Among other features, code is self-modifying by design and the effect of an instruction depends on its address in memory. [28]

Piet

Piet program that prints 'Piet' Piet Program.gif
Piet program that prints 'Piet'
A "Hello World" program in Piet Piet Program Hello World.gif
A "Hello World" program in Piet

Piet is a language designed by David Morgan-Mar, whose programs are bitmaps that look like abstract art. [29] The execution is guided by a "pointer" that moves around the image, from one continuous coloured region to the next. Procedures are carried out when the pointer exits a region.

There are 20 colours for which behaviour is specified: 18 "colourful" colours, which are ordered by a 6-step hue cycle and a 3-step brightness cycle; and black and white, which are not ordered. When exiting a "colourful" colour and entering another one, the performed procedure is determined by the number of steps of change in hue and brightness. Black cannot be entered; when the pointer tries to enter a black region, the rules of choosing the next block are changed instead. If all possible rules are tried, the program terminates. Regions outside the borders of the image are also treated as black. White does not perform operations, but allows the pointer to "pass through". The behaviour of colours other than the 20 specified is left to the compiler or interpreter. [29] [ non-primary source needed ]

Variables are stored in memory as signed integers in a single stack. Most specified procedures deal with operations on that stack, while others deal with input/output and with the rules by which the compilation pointer moves. [30]

Piet was named after the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. [31] The original intended name, Mondrian, was already taken by an open-source statistical data-visualization system. [29]

Shakespeare

Shakespeare Programming Language (SPL) is designed to make programs look like Shakespearean plays. For example, the following statement declares a point in the program which can be reached via a GOTO-type statement:[ citation needed ]

 Act I: Hamlet's insults and flattery.

Unlambda

Unlambda is a minimalist functional programming language based on SKI calculus, but combined with first-class continuations and imperative I/O (with input usually requiring the use of continuations). [32]

Whitespace

Whitespace uses only whitespace characters (space, tab, and return), ignoring all other characters, which can therefore be used for comments. This is the reverse of many traditional languages, which do not distinguish between different whitespace characters, treating tab and space the same. It also allows Whitespace programs to be hidden in the source code of programs in languages like C.[ citation needed ]

Cultural context

The cultural context of esolangs has been studied by Geoff Cox, who writes that esolangs "shift attention from command and control toward cultural expression and refusal", [33] seeing esolangs as similar to code art and code poetry, such as Mez Breeze's mezangelle, a belief shared by others in field. [34] Daniel Temkin describes Brainfuck as "refusing to ease the boundary between human expression and assembly code and thereby taking us on a ludicrous journey of logic," [35] exposing the inherent conflict between human thinking and computer logic by deconstructing their relationship. He connects programming within an esolang to performing an event score such as those of the Fluxus movement, where playing out the irregular rules of the logic in code makes the point of view of the language clear. [36]

Related Research Articles

Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in 1993 by Swiss student Urban Müller. Designed to be extremely minimalistic, the language consists of only eight simple commands, a data pointer and an instruction pointer.

C is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems code, device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.

A "Hello, World!" program is generally a simple computer program that emits to the screen a message similar to "Hello, World!". A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustrate a language's basic syntax. A "Hello, World!" program is often the first written by a student of a new programming language, but such a program can also be used as a sanity check to ensure that the computer software intended to compile or run source code is correctly installed, and that its operator understands how to use it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">INTERCAL</span> Esoteric programming language

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.

In computer programming, a P-code machine is a virtual machine designed to execute P-code, the assembly language or machine code of a hypothetical central processing unit (CPU). The term "P-code machine" is applied generically to all such machines, as well as specific implementations using those machines. One of the most notable uses of P-Code machines is the P-Machine of the Pascal-P system. The developers of the UCSD Pascal implementation within this system construed the P in P-code to mean pseudo more often than portable; they adopted a unique label for pseudo-code meaning instructions for a pseudo-machine.

Befunge is a two-dimensional stack-based, reflective, esoteric programming language. It differs from conventional languages in that programs are arranged on a two-dimensional grid. "Arrow" instructions direct the control flow to the left, right, up or down, and loops are constructed by sending the control flow in a cycle. It has been described as "a cross between Forth and Lemmings".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data type</span> Attribute of data

In computer science and computer programming, a data type is a collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these values as machine types. A data type specification in a program constrains the possible values that an expression, such as a variable or a function call, might take. On literal data, it tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data. Most programming languages support basic data types of integer numbers, floating-point numbers, characters and Booleans.

A one-instruction set computer (OISC), sometimes referred to as an ultimate reduced instruction set computer (URISC), is an abstract machine that uses only one instruction – obviating the need for a machine language opcode. With a judicious choice for the single instruction and given arbitrarily many resources, an OISC is capable of being a universal computer in the same manner as traditional computers that have multiple instructions. OISCs have been recommended as aids in teaching computer architecture and have been used as computational models in structural computing research. The first carbon nanotube computer is a 1-bit one-instruction set computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whitespace (programming language)</span> Esoteric programming language

Whitespace is an esoteric programming language with syntax where only whitespace characters have meaning – contrasting typical languages that largely ignore whitespace characters.

x86 assembly language is the name for the family of assembly languages which provide some level of backward compatibility with CPUs back to the Intel 8008 microprocessor, which was launched in April 1972. It is used to produce object code for the x86 class of processors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malbolge</span> 1998 esoteric programming language

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, 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.

Non-English-based programming languages are programming languages that do not use keywords taken from or inspired by English vocabulary.

scanf, short for scan formatted, is a C standard library function that reads and parses text from standard input.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Recursion (computer science)</span> Use of functions that call themselves

In computer science, recursion is a method of solving a computational problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem. Recursion solves such recursive problems by using functions that call themselves from within their own code. The approach can be applied to many types of problems, and recursion is one of the central ideas of computer science.

The power of recursion evidently lies in the possibility of defining an infinite set of objects by a finite statement. In the same manner, an infinite number of computations can be described by a finite recursive program, even if this program contains no explicit repetitions.

The Mouse programming language is a small computer programming language developed by Dr. Peter Grogono in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was developed as an extension of an earlier language called MUSYS, which was used to control digital and analog devices in an electronic music studio.

Lightweight programming languages are designed to have small memory footprint, are easy to implement, and/or have minimalist syntax and features.

Beatnik is a simple stack-oriented esoteric programming language, by Cliff L. Biffle. A Beatnik program consists of any sequence of English words. Each word is assigned the score one would get for it in a Scrabble game. The value of the score determines what function is performed. Functions include pushing the score of the next word onto the stack, testing the stack and skipping forward or backward in the program and other stack operations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Morgan-Mar</span> Australian scientist and writer

David Morgan-Mar is an Australian physicist, known for his webcomics and for creating several humorous esoteric programming languages. He is also the author of several GURPS roleplaying sourcebooks for Steve Jackson Games, as well as a regular contributor to Pyramid magazine.

Leet is an esoteric programming language based loosely on Brainfuck and named for the resemblance of its source code to the symbolic language "L33t 5p34k". L33t was designed by Stephen McGreal and Alex Mole to be as confusing as possible. It is Turing-complete and has the possibility for self-modifying code. Software written in the language can make network connections and may therefore be used to write malware.

JSFuck is an esoteric subset of JavaScript, where code is written using only six characters: [, ], (, ), !, and +. The name is derived from Brainfuck, an esoteric programming language that also uses a minimalistic alphabet of only punctuation. Unlike Brainfuck, which requires its own compiler or interpreter, JSFuck is valid JavaScript code, meaning that JSFuck programs can be run in any web browser or engine that interprets JavaScript. JSFuck is able to recreate all JavaScript functionality using such a limited set of characters because JavaScript allows the evaluation of any expression as any type.

References

  1. ↑ McLean, A., Griffiths, D., Collins, N., and Wiggins, G. (2010). "Visualisation of Live Code". In Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, London: 2010.
  2. ↑ Matthew Fuller, Software Studies, MIT Press, 2008
  3. ↑ Eric S. Raymond (1996). The New Hacker's Dictionary. MIT Press. p. 258. ISBN   978-0-262-68092-9.
  4. 1 2 Woods, Donald R.; Lyon, James M. (1973), The INTERCAL Programming Language Reference Manual, Muppetlabs.com, retrieved 1 May 2023
  5. ↑ "Interview with Wouter van Oortmerssen". Esoteric.codes. 1 July 2015. Retrieved 1 May 2023.
  6. ↑ Fuller, Matthew (2008). Software studies: a lexicon. MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-06274-9. OCLC   1156851190.
  7. 1 2 3 Morr, Sebastian. "Esoteric Programming Languages." (2015).
  8. ↑ Cox 2013.
  9. ↑ Mike (31 March 2013). "Baking a Hello World Cake". Products of Mike's Mind. Retrieved 1 May 2023.
  10. 1 2 3 4 Mateas, M. and Montfort, N. A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics. In Digital Arts and Culture: Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice(DAC 2005), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2005.
  11. ↑ Gaboury, Jacob (2018). "Critical Unmaking: Toward a Queer Computation". In Jentery Sayers (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge. pp. 483–491. doi:10.4324/9781315730479-50. ISBN   978-1-315-73047-9.
  12. ↑ "Languages".
  13. ↑ John Tromp. "Most functional". The International Obfuscated C Code Contest.
  14. ↑ "El Brainfuck". copy.sh. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  15. ↑ ""Hello world" in Esoteric Programming Languages? (Esolangs)". DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻. 25 July 2020. Retrieved 4 December 2022.
  16. ↑ "Weirdest Programming Languages | Programming". www.omnesgroup.com. 8 August 2018. Retrieved 4 December 2022.
  17. ↑ "8 Goofy Programming Languages". 27 April 2022.
  18. ↑ Hongkiat.com (8 September 2021). "10 Most Bizarre Programming Languages, Vol. 2". Hongkiat. Retrieved 4 December 2022.
  19. ↑ Cozens, Simon (2005). Advanced Perl programming. O'Reilly Media. p. 269. ISBN   978-0-596-00456-9. A final Acme curiosity, and one of my favourites, is Acme::Chef, an implementation of David Morgan-Mar's Chef programming language. In Chef, programs are expressed in the form of recipes: ...
  20. 1 2 Morgan-Mar, David (24 March 2011). "Chef". DM's Esoteric Programming Languages. Self-published. Retrieved 1 May 2023.
  21. ↑ Morgan-Mar, David (28 June 2014). "Chef - Hello World". DM's Esoteric Programming Languages. Self-published. Retrieved 1 May 2023.
  22. ↑ Kneusel, Ronald (2022). Strange Code: Esoteric Languages That Make Programming Fun Again. No Starch Press. p. 217. ISBN   978-1718502406.
  23. ↑ Smith, Darren (2007). "GolfScript Tutorial".
  24. ↑ Bailey, Jane (29 February 2016). "Bidding on Security". The Daily WTF. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  25. ↑ "Exploring JSF*ck". alligator.io. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  26. ↑ Dan Goodin (3 February 2016). "eBay has no plans to fix "severe" bug that allows malware distribution [Updated]". Ars Technica.
  27. ↑ Zabenkov, A.A.; Morel Morel, D.A. (2014). "Esoteric programming languages as a state-of-the-art semiotic trend". Experientia Est Optima Magistra: Collected Arts. 3. Belgorod State University: 170.
  28. ↑ Temkin, Daniel (3 November 2014). "Interview with Ben Olmstead". esoteric.codes. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  29. 1 2 3 Morgan-Mar, David (25 January 2008). "Piet" . Retrieved 1 May 2023.
  30. ↑ Kneusel, Ronald (2022). Strange Code: Esoteric Languages That Make Programming Fun Again. No Starch Press. pp. 246–247. ISBN   978-1718502406.
  31. ↑ Cox 2013 , p. 6
  32. ↑ Chu-Carroll, Mark C. (11 August 2006). "Friday Pathological Programming: Unlambda, or Programming Without Variables". Good Math, Bad Math (blog). ScienceBlogs.
  33. ↑ Cox 2013 , p. 5
  34. ↑ "The true meaning of esoteric programming languages". Apifonica. Retrieved 30 November 2023.
  35. ↑ Temkin, Daniel (15 January 2014). "Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction". NOOART: The Journal of Objectless Art (1).
  36. ↑ Temkin, Daniel (8 May 2013). "brainfuck". Media-N Journal (Spring 2013). Retrieved 1 May 2023.

Bibliography

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