Ah, that explains everything. I have already seen this technique before and wondered why this entry has to be the best of show---I don't doubt it is worth the prize, just that it didn't sound very novel. But it all makes sense if the technique is not well known and authors tried to revitalize that.

Hm, I think you could add numeric syscalls, similar to what happens at the asm level. E.g. put the syscall id and some parameters on the "stack", then let the interpreter run the syscall with a new "instruction" e.g. '!'. This could even substitute '.' (putchar) and ',' (getchar), since these are very much just syscalls. So that would reduce the number of instructions by one (to 7).

Oh, getting to 6 would also be fun: One might replace '[' and ']' with a conditional branch '?'. It just needs two parameters: condition and (signed) number of instructions to jump. Adds the bonus (much like normal asm) to write moch more ~~horribly abusive~~ flexible control flow than a structured "while(*ptr)".