Saturday, November 13, 2010

Programming: COW Interpreter - A java interface for Bovine Programmers...

In one of my lectures at Swansea University the topic of Esoteric Languages came up, mainly on this topic we discussed the languages of BrainF*** and COW.

BrainF*** is a programming language that only contains the characters:
< > + - , . [ ]

COW only contains 12 commands, each written as MOO's:
moo
mOo
moO
mOO
Moo
MOo
MoO
MOO
OOO
MMM
OOM
oom
*These are of course all case sensitive*

Upon further research into these languages I came across this site: http://www.bigzaphod.org/cow/
And with it, a worrying thing arose to me. There were no stable compilers or interpreters for this great language.

Bare in mind ("rawr"), that at this point I had yet to even write a program in COW, but none the less I was enthused by how such a simple architecture could still have a modern day application, given that COW, and BrainF*** alike are based off of the old Tape Driven computer Systems, where a Command Tape drives the position and data stored in a Data Tape.


[ A 26 line COW program that counts indefinitely in Fibonacci Numbers, or until you reach ]
[ a numerical overflow. ]


[ A 1337 line COW program that runs through 99 Bottles of Beer on the wall. ]

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