Whitespace (programming language)

Whitespace is an esoteric programming language developed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris at the University of Durham (also developers of the Kaya and Idris programming languages). It was released on 1 April 2003 (April Fool's Day). Its name is a reference to whitespace characters. Unlike most programming languages, which ignore or assign little meaning to most whitespace characters, the Whitespace interpreter ignores any non-whitespace characters. Only spaces, tabs and linefeeds have meaning.[1] A consequence of this property is that a Whitespace program can easily be contained within the whitespace characters of a program written in another language, except possibly in languages which depend on spaces for syntax validity such as Python, making the text a polyglot.

Whitespace hello world program with syntax highlighting

  tabs

  spaces

The language itself is an imperative stack-based language. The virtual machine on which the programs run has a stack and a heap. The programmer is free to push arbitrary-width integers onto the stack (currently there is no implementation of floating point numbers) and can also access the heap as a permanent store for variables and data structures.

History

Whitespace was created by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris in 2002. Slashdot gave a review of this programming language on 1 April 2003.[2]

The idea of using whitespace characters as operators for the C++ language was facetiously suggested five years earlier by Bjarne Stroustrup.[3]

Syntax

Commands are composed of sequences of spaces, tab stops and linefeeds. For example, tab-space-space-space performs arithmetic addition of the top two elements on the stack. Data is represented in binary using spaces (0) and tabs (1), followed by a linefeed; thus, space-space-space-tab-space-tab-tab-linefeed is the binary number 0001011, which is 11 in decimal. All other characters are ignored and thus can be used for comments.

Code is written as an Instruction Modification Parameter (IMP) followed by the operation.[4] The table below shows a list of all the IMPs in Whitespace.

IMP	Meaning
[Space]	Stack Manipulation
[Tab][Space]	Arithmetic
[Tab][Tab]	Heap Access
[LineFeed]	Flow Control
[Tab][LineFeed]	I/O

Each IMP is followed by one operation defined for that IMP, and a parameter if needed. The list of operations supported in Whitespace is:[4]

IMP	Command	Parameter	Meaning
[Space]	[Space]	Number	Push the number onto the stack
[Space]	[LF][Space]	-	Duplicate the top item on the stack
[Space]	[LF][Tab]	-	Swap the top two items on the stack
[Space]	[LF][LF]	-	Discard the top item on the stack
[Tab][Space]	[Space][Space]	-	Addition
[Tab][Space]	[Space][Tab]	-	Subtraction
[Tab][Space]	[Space][LF]	-	Multiplication
[Tab][Space]	[Tab][Space]	-	Integer Division
[Tab][Space]	[Tab][Tab]	-	Modulo
[Tab][Tab]	[Space]	-	Store in heap
[Tab][Tab]	[Tab]	-	Retrieve from heap
[LF]	[Space][Space]	Label	Mark a location in the program
[LF]	[Space][Tab]	Label	Call a subroutine
[LF]	[Space][LF]	Label	Jump to a label
[LF]	[Tab][Space]	Label	Jump to a label if the top of the stack is zero
[LF]	[Tab][Tab]	Label	Jump to a label if the top of the stack is negative
[LF]	[Tab][LF]	-	End a subroutine and transfer control back to the caller
[LF]	[LF][LF]	-	End the program
[Tab][LF]	[Space][Space]	-	Output the character at the top of the stack
[Tab][LF]	[Space][Tab]	-	Output the number at the top of the stack
[Tab][LF]	[Tab][Space]	-	Read a character and place it in the location given by the top of the stack
[Tab][LF]	[Tab][Tab]	-	Read a number and place it in the location given by the top of the stack

Sample code

The following is a commented Whitespace program that simply prints "Hello, world!", where each Space, Tab, or Linefeed character is preceded by the identifying comment "S", "T", or "L", respectively:

S S S T	S S T	S S S L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	S S T	S T	L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	S T	T	S S L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	S T	T	S S L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	S T	T	T	T	L
T	L
S S S S S T	S T	T	S S L
T	L
S S S S S T	S S S S S L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	T	S T	T	T	L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	S T	T	T	T	L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	T	S S T	S L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	S T	T	S S L
T	L
S S S S S T	T	S S T	S S L
T	L
S S S S S T	S S S S T	L
T	L
S S L
L
L

Note that when Whitespace source code is displayed in some browsers, the horizontal spacing produced by a tab character is not fixed, but depends on its location in the text relative to the next horizontal tab stop. Depending on the software, tab characters may also get replaced by the corresponding variable number of space characters.

See also

• Polyglot, a program valid in more than one language
• Steganography, the technique of concealing a message within another message
• Off-side rule languages, where blocks are expressed by whitespace indentation
  • Python, the best-known example of a language with syntactically significant whitespace
• Esoteric programming languages
  • Brainfuck, which consists of only eight simple commands and an instruction pointer
  • INTERCAL, the "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym"
  • LOLCODE, which is patterned after a series of Internet memes
  • Malbolge, which is specifically designed to be nearly impossible to program in

References

1. "Whitespace". Compsoc. Archived from the original on 1 November 2015. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
2. Timothy (1 April 2003). "New Whitespace-Only Programming Language". Slashdot. Retrieved 23 January 2014.
3. Stroustrup, Bjarne. "Generalizing Overloading for C++2000" (PDF). Florham Park, NJ, USA: AT&T Labs. Retrieved 23 January 2014.
4. "Whitespace Tutorial". CompSoc.dur.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 1 November 2015. Retrieved 8 December 2015.

External links

• Official website
• Release announcement on Slashdot
• Collection of Whitespace interpreters in various script languages
• Acme::Bleach A Perl module that rewrites the body of your module to a whitespace-only encoding ("for really clean programs").