Brainfuck

Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created by Urban Müller in 1993. It is designed to be minimal and challenging, with a Turing-complete model that can be implemented with a small interpreter. The language emphasizes low-level manipulation of memory and pointers rather than readability or practicality.

Programs in Brainfuck consist of eight commands: >, <, +, -, ., ,, [, ]. All other characters are ignored as comments. The program operates on an array of memory cells, usually bytes initialized to zero, with a data pointer starting at the first cell. The common model uses 30,000 cells, though many implementations allocate more as needed.

The commands move the data pointer, modify the current cell, and perform I/O. '>' moves right; '<' left; '+' increments (wraps); '-' decrements; '.' outputs the cell byte as ASCII; ',' reads a byte into the cell (often blocking). '[' begins a loop that runs while the current cell is nonzero; ']' ends the loop and jumps back if nonzero. If the current cell is zero at '[', execution jumps to after the matching ']'.

Because only eight symbols are significant, non-command characters can serve as comments. The language is Turing-complete, meaning it can simulate any computable function given sufficient memory and time. Practical programs tend to be short, but writing meaningful code is difficult due to the terse syntax.

Since its introduction, Brainfuck has inspired a family of esolangs and a large number of interpreters and compilers across languages. It is widely used in academic and recreational settings as a programming puzzle and in code golf, highlighting the relationship between minimal syntax and computational expressiveness.