 A cat program in Malbolge | |
| Paradigm | Esoteric, imperative, scalar, value-level |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Ben Olmstead[1] |
| Developer | Ben Olmstead[1] |
| First appeared | 1998 |
| Typing discipline | Untyped |
| Filename extensions | .mal, .mb |
| Influenced by | |
| Brainfuck, INTERCAL (Tri-INTERCAL), Befunge | |
| Influenced | |
| Dis, Malbolge Unshackled | |
Malbolge (/mælˈboʊldʒ/) is a public domain esoteric programming language invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno, the Malebolge. It was specifically designed to be almost impossible to use, via a counter-intuitive 'crazy operation', base-three arithmetic, and self-altering code.[2] It builds on the difficulty of earlier challenging esoteric languages (such as Brainfuck and Befunge), but exaggerates this aspect to an extreme degree, playing on the entangled histories of computer science and encryption. Despite this design, it is possible to write useful Malbolge programs.