Funge-98 ERRATA

Being a collection of lies, damned lies, and statistics about the Funge-98 Final Specification.

Edition: May 22, 2018.

This document does not aim to list all the ambiguities in the spec. There are several instances where some implementors have interpreted a statement one way, and other implementors have interpreted it another way. Such instances may or may not be listed in this document, but if they are, please do not expect to find a normative interpretation of them here.

Befunge-93 cells were not unsigned

Reported by James Holderness on January 16th, 2016, in this GitHub issue.

In the section "Code and Data" the claim is made that Befunge-93 "defines unsigned 8-bit Funge-Space cells".

In fact, cells in the original Befunge-93 implementation were char type, which ANSI C does not mandate as either signed or unsigned. Because the compilers typically used to compile this code used signed chars, and several prominent example programs relied on this behaviour, Befunge-93 was popularly understood to have signed cells, so if you are looking for a de facto standard for signedness of the cells in Befunge-93, that would probably be it. But that's Befunge-93, not Funge-98, anyway.

Incorrect delta for south/north

Reported by Bennett Bernardoni on June 21st, 2017, in this GitHub issue.

Contra the statement in the section titled "Instruction Pointer", it is in fact the case that (0,-1) is called north and is depicted as being more up the page or screen, and (0,1) is called south and is depicted as being more down the page or screen.