brainfuck-interpreter

Interpreter for the esoteric programming language, brainfuck.

What is Brainfuck?

Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language in which there is an array of ascii characters (with a size of at least 30,000 cells), and a pointer which can move from cell to cell one at a time. The pointer can also increment or decrement the values in each cell one at a time. The language consists of only 8 commands as follows:

Command	Action
>	move to next cell
<	move to previous cell
+	increment the value of the current cell by 1
-	decrement the value of the current cell by 1
.	print the ascii character of the current cell to stdout
,	get a character from stdin and store it in the current cell
[	if the current cell is 0, jump to the matching ]
]	if the current cell is not 0, jump to the matching [

Note: My implementation of Brainfuck is memory safe. In other words, using < from cell 0 will wrap around to the last cell, and using > from the last cell will wrap around to the first cell, eliminating the possibility of dangling pointers.

If you would like to learn more about the brainfuck language, you can check out the esolangs wiki.

If you would like to try to master the language, feel free to build my interpreter on your system (instructions below) or try out this nifty brainfuck visualizer.

Language Extensions

The following are extra brainfuck commands added in my own language extension to brainfuck. These commands are not part of the core brainfuck language, and will not work in compilers or interpreters other than mine.

Command	Action
!	set the value of the current cell to 0
&	move the pointer to the index in the tape defined by the value at the current cell
?	output a debug message

Note: If you want to disable the language extensions, you can pass the -s or --strict flags to the interpeter when you run the program.

Flags

Flag	Action
-s/--strict	Disables the language extension, so only official bf commands work.

Build Instructions

$ git clone https://github.com/fabiocolacio/brainfuck-interpreter
$ cd brainfuck-interpreter
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

Installation Instructions

After building, run:

$ sudo make install