Talk:Malbolge

Hello World

Should "hello world" be capitalized the way it is? It originally had no caps i believe. Now it has odd mixture of upper/lowercase letters. Perl 00:07, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Looking at the rest of the article, you'll see that no human-written malbolge programs exist, only ones that have been 'found' - essentially by trial and error. So ideally, we would include a program that displayed "Hello, world" or some other rational equivalent, but the best that exists is one that displays an odd mixture of upper and lower case. What that exact mixture is, I couldn't tell you for sure without a malbolge compiler to run it through, but I think the basic idea is correct. - IMSoP 00:29, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC) [Apologies for my over-verbosity, it's late and I'm tired]

Yes, it is actually "hEllO wORld". MISSINGNO. was here. 22:32, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Now a moot point, since Antwon posted his version.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.216.191.183 (talk • contribs) 01:44, 27 July 2004‎

Quite easy

Today, after reading here how hard it is, I wrote a program which generates Malbolge programs writing various strings. It was quite easy. :-)

I'm going to describe right now. Taw 12:03, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The article doesn't say that it is hard. It says that when the language came out, it was hard. No one working with it at the time took the time or knew how to simplify it until a few years later. With the simplified explanation added to the article, it is much easier to understand than the language specification made it. — 12.214.45.9 20:08, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

These "simplification" are trivial. For anyone with even the most basic understanding of cryptography, it is obvious that you can get rid of one of lookup tables, substractions and additions. Therefore your claim that it was difficult and is easy now is false. Probably no hello world was written in the first 2 years only because hardly anyone seriously tried. Taw 04:00, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Pointer notation

From the "Pointer notation" section:

[d] means the value of d is a memory address; [d] is the value stored at the address.

This is very unclear to me, and I don't know what it's trying to say: could someone clarify? AndrewWTaylor 14:41, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

This cannot be fixed effectively unless you are more specific. What about it is unclear ? Do you not understand what a memory address is, or what it means to store something at an address, or something else ? Was the section explaining what d means unclear or unread by you ? — 131.230.133.186 10:20, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Saying "[d] means the value of d is a memory address" is like saying "the mane is the hair on a horse is an animal". Kind of a broken sentence. Bromskloss 18:21, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I think I understand. Perhaps a better phrasing would have been "[d] means that the value of d is a memory address". — 131.230.133.186 12:37, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Instructions section

The instruction jmp is defined as 'jmp [d] + 1'. Is this realy correct?
I wrote an interpreter in VB.Net VisualStudio 2010 and it runs the 99 bottle loop correctly only with the definition 'jmp [d]' without the + 1.
Also the section says 'After each instruction is executed, the guilty instruction gets encrypted (see below) so that it won't do the same thing next time, unless a jump just happened. Right after a jump, Malbolge will encrypt the innocent instruction just prior to the one it jumped to instead.'
My interpreter makes no difference in the encryption between jmp and any other instruction. Any suggestions? If interested in my interpreter feel free to contact rheinflut1995@netcologne.de
Rheinflut1995 (talk) 22:07, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Crazy operation

Where does the name "Crazy" come from? From what I can see, the original specification, source code, and Lou Scheffer's page all refer to it simply as "Op". The only external reference I can see using the term "Crazy" is Esolang. Perhaps Wikipedia should refer to it simply as "Op" as well? —MattGiuca (talk) 05:06, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Interesting. The esolang mention is newer than the wikipedia one, and might be inherited from here, although comparing with wikipedia from the same time period it doesn't seem to use exactly the same terminology. I googled the old esoteric mailing list archives from 2001-2004, and the term is not used there. (But I didn't check how much Malbolge was discussed at all there.) I'm not sure where else to check. I posted a question at the esolang talk page. --Ørjan (talk) 02:02, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Cycles

The article mentions six different cycles, but at a cursory glance, I was not able to find every number from 0 to 93 in them. It is trivial to prove that they all have to be in some cycle: if there was a number that wasn't in any cycle, the sequence starting from it would have to generate new numbers forever, but this is impossible, as the numbers are mod 94. There are therefore two possibilities: I did not look at the article well enough, or there are some cycles not listed in the article. JIP | Talk 20:12, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

I just checked, they are all there. The numbers 0-32 are given as 94-126, which are the same mod 94. This is because Malbolge restricts the results to the 94 printable ASCII characters except space, starting at no. 33 (!). --Ørjan (talk) 11:39, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Difficulty? Why?

What is actually so difficult about Malbolge? Of course it is hard to write programs by hand. But why is it so difficult for a machine, that the first program of that kind needed several years? Don't you think that it is rather a question of little knowledge of the existance of the language? --87.172.182.231 (talk) 16:02, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree - taking a lot of time tells only that it's so obscure that nobody cared enough to try. It's not like there were thousands of scholars all around the world wracking their brains to come up with a solution. --188.238.131.94 (talk) 11:00, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Referenced in popular culture

If someone cares to do a proper edit, it's referred to in Elementary, season 1 episode 10.