The reason for the existence of these code snippets is my interest in an interactive simulation of Von Neumann machine called Vic, created and maintained by Prof. Shimon Schocken who I had the pleasure of learning from in IDC.
As explained by Schocken, the "objective of Vic is to walk the user through some of the most fundamental ideas underlying the design of modern computers". In my opinion, Brainf*ck and Vic are almost as lost cousins; both simulate a computer's main memory, a program counter and simple I\O capabilities.
After being introduced to Vic, I was intrigued to learn how the computer works to compute, even the most simple algorithms, which is demonstrated very well by both Vic and Brainf*ck. It is important, though both languages are Turing complete, to mention that the two languages are not identical; Vic is much more of an assembler language and tries its best to mimic one. In contrast, Brainf*ck is an esoteric programming language, and is designed for minimalism.
Learning the language is certainly not hard; it consists a total of 8 commands, explained here. The challenge of writing a Brainf*ck program is actually writing algorithm itself, even the simplest algorithms; addition, substraction, incrementing\decrementing etc. This is not an easy task at all; give a shot making an if {...} else {...} statement! (by the way, if you wanna see how it looks like, check out this line of the isnum algorithm).
The best way to learn is to experiment with a compiler, described below.
You can find many (fairly small!) compilers in GitHub, but probably the simplest one is the Brainf*ck Visualizer, which you don't have to install locally but rather play with it online.
Just search Google Images for 'ascii table', and you'll find all sorts of these. Just make sure you're looking at the decimal representation of the ascii character, and not the hexadecimal or octal ones.
You don't. I don't. Nobody does. But I'd rather let it die peacefuly in this repo than on my machine.
Detailed documentation are intended mainly for educational purposes. All of the relevant docs for all files are in the docs folder of the master branch. I'll try and address all major parts in the code and seperate them, and in particular, explain rather complicated parts and concepts.