New Whitespace-Only Programming Language

foobarbazquux writes "Introducing whitespace, a language designed to compensate for the "white-space doesn't count" culture of contemporary programming languages. Amaze your friends by hiding programs in your web-pages! Astound colleagues by putting a virus in your text file!" (And for those who prefer obfuscation to invisibility, Koshatul writes "This article in the Sydney Morning Herald, tells of a new programming language which 'makes it impossible to express a security vulnerability in a program's source code.'")

and none of these languages

[circletimessquare]

make it past the slashdot lameness filter

Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.

sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

backin the day this probably could have gotten VC backing ...

In other news...

[Powercntrl]

ATI just released a new version of their Catalyst drivers, and it fixes every known bug in every single game in existance. ATI also mentioned this driver fully supports Duke Nukem Forever, which was also released today.

Incredibly compressible

[Alereon]

I've found that GZIP is able to compress source code written in whitespace by up to 99.9%! This is truly an incredible advance in application development and distribution!

I'm busy dammit!

[Mattygfunk1]

I don't have enough time to learn yet another language. This isn't fair. Management is apparently already considering this as the "future of our progressive company".

Then again as long as it doesn't use pointers the uni students will be happy.

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A million monkeys...

[ahkbarr]

...at keyboards, typing forever need only hit the space and/or tab keys to create the infamous do_stuff()! A breakthrough!

Finally, I have the monkeys.. Now, to acquire the keyboards... Quickly too, because the monkeys are starting to get stank.

"...now strip down and get on the probulator!"
-Capt. Leela

I have something to say

[WhiteBandit]

Re:Old news; Acme::Bleach

[Phroggy]

Hit your nearest CPAN mirror and 'use Acme::Bleach' for great justice.

Speaking of which, have you seen http://www.cpan.org/ today? ;-)

Source Example

[coene]

Well, I WOULD post a source example if Slashdot's "whitespace filter" and "lameness filter" wouldent prevent it...

What's a guy gotta do to post whitespace source code around here?

Security vulnerability in whitespace

[tconnors]

See, in .au, it is no longer April Fools. I almost fell for the NewCode thing, until about half way through!

But I foiled the whitespace langauge. You can't see it, until you click and drag down the mozilla windows. Ha ha! I can see it now! Suckers.

Re:Please not again...

[Zork the Almighty]

At least we know, because real articles are usually posted twice.

Combine them

[traskjd]

I'm waiting for the next topic on the frontpage -

"Gentoo Developers to recode kernal in whitespace" :D

Next in the news....

[Snowpony]

"whitespace" code broken by buffer overflow. Internationalisation of the "space" key blamed. Authorities warn not to use international versions whitespace.

"It was horrible..one minute I was sitting in a counting loop and then the next thing I know someone pushed [TAB][SPACE][TAB][TAB] into the execution queue and all heck broke loose...."

Sigh

[arvindn]

I have written a truly remarkable program in whitespace which prints out a proof of Fermat's last theorem.

Unfortunately, I'm unable to post the source code here because of slashdot's lameness filter :(

gnome extensions

[more fool you]

so when will the mono & NewCode# extensions be available?

Re:Please not again...

[TheFrood]

Do the editors realize that it undermines the whole point of April Fool's Day when everything they post is a joke?

Yes, they do. At the end of the day, they'll do an April Fool's Wrapup article, where they'll explain that they do it to get the flames. In other words, they basically admit to trolling their readership.

Then, of course, a month later they'll be wondering why nobody's willing to pay for Slashdot.

TheFrood

Re:Old news; Acme::Bleach

[Adam9]

I checked Matt's Script Archive and they didn't have it..

Is there another source?

Site's down.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Here's a mirror [about].

Did any of you have this problem...

[arvindn]

I'm using vim, and I couldn't get any of my whitespace programs to run. I realized it was because I'd set the "expandtab" variable: it expands all tabs to spaces.

;^)

Re:April fools, but

[prockcore]

I just want to mention that April Fools to me has always been to make up BELIEVABLE stories that you can gloat over later - which really adds to more of the fun.

Right, it's not a successful april fools joke until you get convicted of fraud.

C++ already did this

[edhall]

Bjarne Stroustrup wrote a paper [att.com] a few years back proposing overloading the C++ whitespace operator, and claimed that the next C++ standard would include this feature. This allows for intuitive pratices such as using a space to indicate multiplication:

double x = 1.4;
double y = 2.5 x;

or string concatenation:

string s("first");
string s2 = s "post";

Other uses, such as making whichspace equivalent to the -> operator for particular classes can go far to make C++ syntax less obscure.

It's a cool paper; check it out. If you have problems finding it, just Google for "B Stroustrup: Generalizing Overloading for C++2000. Overload, Issue 25. April 1, 1998."

-Ed

Oh really?

[kinnell]

April Fools to me has always been to make up BELIEVABLE stories that you can gloat over later

Only 2 symbols are required to express any algorythm (1 and 0), and whitespace has 3 ([SPACE], [TAB] and [LF]). I can see no reason off hand why whitespace cannot work, and in fact without having tried it, I suspect it is probably genuine, if not entirely serious.

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Python's already been invented

Now the RIAA will be after us all!

[astrophysics]

Forget the DeCSS T-shirts. Xerox is selling boxes of DeCSS source code in whitespace at Staples. And my department has a cabinet full of backup copies of the source. That should keep the RIAA busy for a good while.

All I have to say is

[patthoyts]

>>>>>++[<++++>-]<[<++++>-]<<<<>>++++[<+++++>-]<[ <++++++>-]<-.
>+++++[<--->-]<.+.>++++[<+++>-]<-.>+++[<----->-]<. >+++++[<+++>
-]<-.---.>+++++[<--->-]<.++.++.>>>.<<<++++.>++[<++ +++>-]<.>>>.
<<<>+++[<---->-]<-.>+++[<+++>-]<.+++.>>>.<<<------ .>+++[<--->
-]<--.>++++[<+++>-]<.>++[<---->-]<.>++++[<+++>-]<+ .+.

Re:Ok. Stop it.

[ebbomega]

Because we're nerds.

Is this so hard to understand? We're the type of people who laughed at three Austin Powers Movies worth of the same jokes. The type of people who felt kinship with the horrible jokes of Revenge of the Nerds. The type of people who thought Hackers was hilarious (Oooo! A 28.8bps modem!!!)

By all means, laugh at us rather than with us. It's not like nobody ever has before. I mean, they call us nerds for a reason.

Why must so many people have such contempt for nerdy action on a website with the slugline "News For Nerds"?

Re:Ok. Stop it.

[Rolo Tomasi]

Internet April Fools Jokes are inheritently un-funny.

Well, it's what you make of it. For example, this morning I exchanged the sugar in the sugar bowl with salt and watched someone spit coffee all over the place. That was funny.

Oh, you mean jokes with, like, words and stuff ...

New business plan for Whitespace

[RyatNrrd]

1.

2.

3. PROFIT!

What?

[thinduke]

They reinvented Python?

Re:Ok. Stop it.

[gl4ss]

well, i did something more internet related, i changed the internet explorer icon to to wipe the harddrive on my roomies computer, NOW THAT IS FUNNY.

not

Re:Ok. Stop it.

[druske]

Normal newsoutlets have one April fools joke. Why does slashdot have to be different?

You think this is bad, wait until Taco wakes up and starts posting duplicates!

I want to submit a patch for the hello program

[Skreech]

There's a buffer overflow that can lead to root access with the hello-asking-name program. Here's a patch.

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Re:Please not again...

[TheRaven64]

At least we know, because real articles are usually posted twice.

Thank you for clarifying that. This one [slashdot.org], which is a duplicate of this one [slashdot.org], must be a real article. I shall read it with interest.

Re:April fools, but

[Alsee]

Right, it's not a successful april fools joke until you get convicted of fraud.

Or manslaughter.

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