BrainHack is a Haskell implementation of the Brain-Flak language.
BrainHack can be run by compiling and running BrainHack.hs. This can be compiled with ghc:
$ ghc BrainHack.hs
To run a Brain-Flak program call the resulting binaries with the name of the file where the source is located and the arguments for the program.
Example:
$ ./BrainHack source.flk 1 3 6
Here is a comparison between BrainHack and Rain-Flak (the standard Ruby interpreter)
BrainHack is much faster than Rain-Flak. Considerable testing puts the BrainHack at 50 times the speed of Rain-Flak.
BrainHack uses #{...} for block comments. While in Rain-Flak # comments out the rest of the line.
BrainHack requires braces to be balanced inside of comments, while Rain-Flak does not parse its comments.
BrainHack will automatically use ASCII input if you format your input as a string. For example
$BrainHack -e "({}())" '"String"'
BrainHack will also allow input of mixed types for example:
$BrainHack -e "({}())" 2 '"String"'
Will have both 2 and String as inputs.
Rain-Flak requires a -a flag to be passed to turn on ASCII input, mixed input is not allowed in Rain-Flak.
BrainHack has a full debugger using the @ syntax borrowed from Rain-Flak. However BrainHack uses slightly different flags than Rain-Flak.
For a detailed comparison run both of the interpreters with the -H option.
Both interpreters have flags that are unique to the specific interpreter however Rain-Flak has more.
While both interpreters can run Miniflak code, BrainHack has special optimizations to make Miniflak faster when run.
BrainHack only supports Vanilla Brain-Flak and Miniflak (not all features are available with Miniflak), while Rain-Flak supports, Vanilla, Mini-flak, Brain-Flak Classic and Brain-Flueue, all with full features.