This is the ??? programming language. Have you ever been writing a play, essay, or other work of literature and thought to yourself, "Man, wouldn't it be great if I could embed a program in this using punctuation?" Well now you can.
??? is a trivial Brainfuck substitution, meaning that a trivial replacement of operators will result in an equivalent BF program. Unsurprisingly, this means that ??? works the same way as BF: It operates on an array of memory cells (also called the tape), each initially set to 0, and has a pointer initially pointing to the first memory cell. It also means that it's a Turing complete language.
There are only three distinctions between how BF and ??? work in practice:
- In ???, traveling left of the starting cell is a no-op.
- In BF, loops are constructed using
[and]. ??? uses a single character for loop boundaries, namely", with'as a toggle between open and closed. - When printing to STDOUT, ??? prints unprintable characters using their hex representations. Printable characters appear normally.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
; |
Move the pointer to the right |
- |
Move the pointer to the left |
. |
Increment the memory cell under the pointer |
, |
Decrement the memory cell under the pointer |
! |
Output the character signified by the cell at the pointer |
? |
Input a character and store it in the cell at the pointer |
" |
Jump to the matching " if the cell under the pointer is 0 |
' |
Toggles whether subsequent " commands start or end a loop |
Initially, " begins a loop.
The creators of the language would like to extend a special thank you to Stack Exchange users aditsu, Doorknob, Reto Koradi, and Martin Ender for inspiration and suggesting improvements/fixes.