Brainycake

Background

I went to college for a couple of semesters and one of my classes was an Algorithms class. The professor assigned us to write a command-line application that would print out a diamond with a user-specified height. He said we could write it in any language that we wanted.

I had just written the exact same program in my C++ class so I considered using that, but decided to have some fun and write it in Brainfuck. The core logic wasn’t too bad, but outputting long strings (for prompts) sucks so I made this language to make that less painful.

Note: You can check out the actual diamond implementation here: diamond.bc

Language Design

As I got more into the project, one of the things that kept me interested was coming up with new functionality and intuitive ways to represent it. In doing so, it definitely strayed from the heart of Brainfuck, but it was fun to experiment none-the-less.

Transpiling

I also experimented with the idea of a compiler that would translate the raw Brainycake code into C, then compile it using GCC. I didn’t quite finish the implementation for some of the more advanced operators, but it works for standard Brainfuck.

Final Thoughts

There’s not much more I can really say about this project - it was just a fun toy project. If I get the chance, I may revisit it in the future to make some more expansions.