Syntax

The syntax of brainease code is similar to batch, because each instruction is in his line of code.

instruction 1
instruction 2
instruction 3
# and so on...

Indentation System

Some instructions may requires his owns inner code, like loop or if. In this case, you can indent them with 2 spaces. No more, no less.

instruction 1
  # This instruction belongs to the instruction 1 above.
  # And may, or may not be executed
  instruction 2

    # And this to the instruction 2.
    instruction 3

  # This still belongs to the instruction 1
  instruction 4

# And this one is outside the instruction 1 indentation scope.
instruction 5

Identifying Pointers, Cells, Numbers and Chars.

Brainease syntactically identifies pointers, cells and values by the following rules:

• *@ is a raw pointer. It starts at 0 and can be incremented or decremented by the goto instruction.

• *<number> represents a memory cell. Ex: *2 refers to the cell at the index 2.

• '<char>' is a character. It supports the \ escape sequence and internally is converted to a number by getting his ASCII code. Ex: 'a' is converted to 97, if needed.

• <number> is a raw number. Depending on the instruction, it can be used to increment a value, decrement or be a condition.

Learn by example

There are plenty examples at the examples folder. But this simpler one may help you to get started:

# This is a comment
# Empty lines are ignored
# This is also a multi-line comment

# Increments 123 in the current cell
inc 123 in *2

# If the cell 2 is bigger or equal to 120, then print the char 'H' to stdout.
if *2 >= 120
  print 'H'

# This will move the pointer to the right until the pointer
# reaches a cell with a value of 0
loop *@
  goto right


# this is a instruction
inc 123 in *2 # 123 is a raw number and *2 is a memory index

IDE Support

There is a plan to add support for VSCode with an official extension. But until then, you can enable syntax highlighting for your favorite IDE by aliasing all .brain files to the R Programming Language.

Here's an example of brainease code highlighted with R syntax:

print 'A'

inc 1 in *2

# Multi
# Line
# comment

loop *@
  if *2 >= 17 # Some comment
    exit

  # Pointer
  save 'a' at *@
  goto left by 3