Talk:Babelfuck

this page doesn't make sense, I don't understand what this is trying to prove. saying that one should parse the constant string stored as brainfuck and use that as the output (assuming that's what this is getting at) completely goes against the definition that the language has no I/O and has no commands. a true implementation would only do as the language is described, which is to store a string and do nothing with it. having the implementation do anything beyond that makes it inaccurate to how the language is described —aadenboy (talk|contribs) 17:45, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

i agree on the contradiction part, i think that what he wanted to say is that some esolangs have crippled i/o, and so we need to interpret the output of the program in some way, lets say we have this brainfuck derivative where . outputs e instead of current cell value, in this case, we can interpret the amount of es as an unary number (that may encode a string), though i doubt we need a turing complete language for any output interpretation, maybe a PDA is enough? --dragoneater67 talk 18:40, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

You're right, this language does do nothing, but all the out-of-definition actions we've taken were all initialization and interpretation. Well, if a language has no built-in I/O methods, and we still want to prove its Turing completeness, there'll always have to be an interpretation process involved. Take Minsky machine for example, which uses integer registers, to show that it is Turing complete, we have to somehow interpret integers into strings. But that "int to str" process does not count as definition at all. Same logic, but pushed further, Babelfuck also doesn't include the entire brainfuck-running process into its definition, instead using it as interpretation. Of course the page doesn't make sense. But that was because it was built on a doesn't-make-sense interpretation standard. And the limit of interpretation is exactly what this page aims to discuss. --GUAqwq (talk) 10:49, 20 August 2026 (UTC)