Historical Befunge-93 Sources

Found amongst my Amiga disk backup images.

bef-1.0rc2

Sources for what was probably not the first release of the Befunge distribution (its language document, reference implementation, and the initial example programs), but something very close to it.

Both the C source code for the interpreter, and the language document, describes this as "version 1.0". However, this version does not yet mention or support the backquote (greater-than) command, and subsequent release history (in the comment at the top of bef.c) suggests that it was present in 1.0 and not added in a later version.

The language document is clearly the document on which the current Befunge-93.markdown is based, but it includes an introductory HISTORY section that was at some point subsequently removed.

The confusingly-named src directory contains example programs, along with a sources.doc which describes and attributes each of them.

However, the last 3 examples listed in sources.doc, namely anagram.bf, numer.bf, and toupper.bf, were not actually present in the backup image. But they did appear in later releases, and are included in the eg directory of the reference distribution as of this writing.

In addition, the chars.bf example differs from the one in the reference distribution as of this writing, suggesting it was edited at some point, but by who and for what purpose is not clear.

bef-1.0rc1

Sources, document, and example programs dated September 5, 1993.

The language document is the same as in bef-1.0, and so claims that this is version 1.0. The source code for the interpreter, however, makes no claims as to its version (and in fact is pretty stingy on comments across the board.)

In fact this C source may well have been the first thrown-together version of the Befunge interpreter.

There are two example programs here which did not appear in 1.0: beep.bf, which simply outputs a BEL character, and huh.bf, which outputs a random (but not uniformly random) sequence of 6's and 7's.

prehistoric

As described in its contained README, this subdirectory contains documents describing an entirely different language, also called "Befunge", dated January 1993, illustrating how long the name "Befunge" existed before the programming language now known as Befunge.