Lisp in an “impossible” language, the most complex Malbolge program to date

That is like... ENIAC levels of performance. I want to say at least the interpreter has more RAM available to it than an ENIAC would, but I&#x27;m not sure enough of how malbolge works to be sure about that!<p>On behalf of the HN gestalt, I award this program the official Hacker News Bloatiest Bloat award for 2021. HN commentators are now invited to derail the perennial bloat arguments with constant observations that &quot;At least it&#x27;s not as bloated as that Lisp interpreter written in Malbolge.&quot;<p>SIGBOVIK also take note.

&gt; Malbolge Unshackled - Malbolge Unshackled is a dialect of Malbolge from 2007 by Ørjan Johansen. It attempts to remove the arbitrary memory limits of Malbolge in order to create a language that is hopefully Turing complete, while keeping closely to the spirit of Malbolge in most ways.<p>&gt; Malbolge - Malbolge, invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, is an esoteric programming language designed to be as difficult to program in as possible. The first &quot;Hello, world!&quot; program written in it was produced by a Lisp program using a local beam search of the space of all possible programs. More practical programming methods have been found later. It is modelled as a virtual machine based on ternary digits.<p>Seems like a lot of fun to try to program a lisp in these languages, although I&#x27;m nowhere near as crazy as the author to actually sit down and do it. Kudos author!

I would like to know what techniques the author used to build the interpreter. Was it done by hand? Was it semi-automated?<p>The reason I ask is, the Wikipedia article mentions the extreme difficulty of writing even a simple Hello World program (to the point where a brute-force automated search was required to &quot;find&quot; one).. a working Lisp interpreter seems to me to be many orders of magnitude more difficult than that.

From the linked Wikipedia article<p>&gt; In the soap opera General Hospital, Colonel Sanders of KFC makes a guest appearance because someone is trying to kill him to obtain the secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices. He knows Malbolge and is able to disarm the destruct sequence.<p>I didn&#x27;t realize General Hospital was willing to get this silly. Kudos to the KFC marketing team though; they do some outrageous stuff. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;generalhospital&#x2F;status&#x2F;1015384908192190464" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;generalhospital&#x2F;status&#x2F;10153849081921904...</a>

For years I&#x27;ve wanted a video game that lets you play the part of a wizard in the D&amp;D sense: painstakingly decoding the threads of arcane reality, looking for ways they can be utilized. This always sort of felt adjacent to code, but of course code isn&#x27;t very hard to figure out and being able to freely command the game world via anything like normal code would quickly become overpowered and uninteresting<p>But now I&#x27;m imagining some sort of Malbolge-based magic system (ascii characters mapped to runic symbols for flavor, of course), where getting it to do the simplest of tasks really is an accomplishment

This interpreter was obviously not written by hand, the author has likely written a compiler from a sane language to malbolge and used it to obtain this result. It would be much more interesting to see the source for this compiler to malbolge or have an explanation of how it works.

Finally! A Lisp that lets me also interop with the Malbolge ecosystem!<p>jk jk, super cool

&gt;&gt; Do you want your code featured? Please open a pull request.<p>I&#x27;ll have to keep an eye on that repository. I would like to be the first to know when, inevitably, someone makes a pull request for a Malbolge Unshackled interpreter written in MalbolgeLisp.

<i>Obviously</i> someone decided to program in a literal line noise language.

Interesting deep-drive into this part of esolangs, I like the mathematic look on it

This title seems misleading, the actual quote is:<p>&gt; Malbolge is a public domain esoteric programming language. It was specifically designed to be almost impossible to use, via a counter-intuitive &#x27;crazy operation&#x27;, trinary arithmetic, and self-modifying code.

a special shout out to the (nonworking??) malbolge programs on <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;c0d3.attorney" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;c0d3.attorney</a>

lisp finds a way.

transpiled, boring

Why do I need to download a 7z file to view the source code?

What a pointless endeavour

Why is there human attention focused on this at this point in time?

Why add clickbait bullshit like &quot;impossible&quot; to the title? The article title is <i>A lightweight (150MB) Lisp interpreter in Malbolge Unshackled, often dubbed the hardest turing complete programming language.</i><p>That should be the submission title, per HN rules.