As a human being, you are exposed to learn a language as soon as you are born. It is easy to learn the languages we speak as they are somehow innate, but when it comes to learning a programming language, the difficulty level slightly increases. You would have heard of C++, PHP, and Java that you learn at school slightly and then while graduating, especially if you belong to the Computer Science Branch while doing engineering.
Also, if you intend to build your career in the coding sector or programming, then you need to learn these languages thoroughly. Here, we are going to discuss one of the most difficult languages, or esoteric programming languages, i.e., Malbolge.
Some of the informative and interesting factors related to Malbolge:
- Malbolge is an esoteric programming language that doesn’t belong to any development purpose; it is learned by either hobbyists or hackers.
- The name of Malbolge is kept after the hell’s eighth circle in Dante’s inferno, where scammers are punished. And one more reason to refer it for the name is due to the level of difficulty it proposes.
- Malbolge was created by Ben Olmstead in the year 1998, and it was so complicated that even its creator didn’t write a single program through it.
- After the introduction or creation of this language, it took around two years to write the very first program in it.
- The first program written in this language wasn’t written by a human being; it got generated through a beam search algorithm, i.e., Heuristic Search Algorithm designed by Andrew Cooke. It was implemented in Lisp, i.e., a type of computer program.
- It was Hisashi Lizawa who offered a guide for programming in Malbolge to propose obfuscation in software protection.
- The programming through Malbolge cannot be done by a human, but its performed by a computer itself.
- Malbolge plays with the embroiled histories related to computer science, as well as encryption.
- The level of difficulty can be seen by the program of “HELLO WORLD!” in Malbolge: (=<`#9]~6ZY32Vx/4Rs+0No-&Jk)”Fh}|Bcy?`=*z]Kw%oG4UUS0/@-ejc(:’8dc
- When it comes to explaining the design of Malbolge, it can be elaborated as a machine language being seen from a ternary virtual machine, i.e., the Malbolge interpreter. Thought the standard interpreter doesn’t match with the officially described specification.
- The associated compiler stops executing as soon as data goes outside the 33-126 range. Initially, it was understood as a bug, but Ben Olmstead defined it as an intentional ‘bug in the specification.’
- Malbolge comprises three registers in total, which are, a, c, and d. the values of all the three registers remain zero as soon as the program starts. Here ‘a’ stands for ‘accumulator,’ ‘c’ stands for ‘code pointer,’ and ‘d’ stands for ‘data pointer,’ which holds a specific memory address.
- The virtual machine associated with Malbolge carries 59,049 memory locations, holding value starting from 0 to 59048. Each of these locations can contain a ten-trit ternary number.
- Malbolge includes eight instructions within. And by taking the value [c], it figures out the instruction to be executed. It adds the value of c to the instruction and considers the remainder when it’s divided by 94. And, the final result is concluded accordingly.
- Before the introduction of Malbolge, Brainfuck was considered as one of the most difficult languages which were introduced by Urban Müller in the year 1993. As the name showcases, one can get brain fuck while learning the language. But voila! Malbolge is now here to brain fuck the Brainfuck language.
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