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.'")

fp

[ux500]

this joke sucks

Ok. Stop it.

[Svenne]

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

Re:Ok. Stop it.

[ChazeFroy]

The novelty of this wore off in 1998.

Re:April fools, but

[Zork the Almighty]

I thought the Gentoo one was pretty good.

Re:April fools, but

[cgreuter]

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.

Perhaps I'm being trolled here, but I went ahead and downloaded the interpreter and wrote a toy program with it, so this is a real language.

And that is the real April Fool's joke.

Unicode for the next version?

[pesc]

I am looking forward to the Unicode version of whitespace. This would truly demonstrate the expressfullness of Unicode as it has several whitespace characters.

$ grep ";WS;" UnicodeData.txt [unicode.org]
000C;;Cc;0;WS;;;;;N;FORM FEED (FF);;;;
0020;SPACE;Zs;0;WS;;;;;N;;;;;
1680;OGHA M SPACE MARK;Zs;0;WS;;;;;N;;;;;
2000;EN QUAD;Zs;0;WS;2002;;;;N;;;;;
2001;EM QUAD;Zs;0;WS;2003;;;;N;;;;;
2002;EN SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2003;EM SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2004;THREE-PER-EM SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2005;FOUR-PER-EM SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2006;SIX-PER-EM SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2007;FIGURE SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2008;PUNCTUATION SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2009;THIN SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
200A;HAIR SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2028;LINE SEPARATOR;Zl;0;WS;;;;;N;;;;;
202F;NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
205F;MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
3000;IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;

Re:Please not again...

[horza]

Slashdot is a meta-blog, not a real news source. It's fun to see the best/cleverest April Fools from around the world, even if we sorta know what's coming. Though it would also be fun to have an outrageously obvious April Fools posted that turns out to be true ;->

Phillip.

Re:Stereotypes

[ebbomega]

Sure, great, wonderful.

But, once again, it doesn't say "News for Computer users and developers" it says "News for Nerds" Why is this such a problem to understand? And why is it always such a problem around here when someone does something nerdy? Honestly, I see people flamed all the time for that kind of stuff. Every once in a while people need a kick in the butt to remind themselves of where this comes from. I personally like that they go overboard with the jokes. Gives me more stuff to laugh at.

Re:Incredibly compressible

[jc42]

Compressing whitespace code is probably a good idea, and not just for the space savings. Among the many problems with the email system, one of the really annoying things is the fact that whitespace is often damaged in transit. This is especially true for trailing whitespace, and of course, whitespace code is entirely trailing whitespace, and likely to be fully trimmed from messages. So to send it via email or other messaging software, you will need to encode it somehow. GZIPping it or BASE65-encoding it will work.

You can see the problem with another message posted nearby on /., where the poster says "I have something to say" and the message is blank. If you check the source of the web page, you'll find that there isn't any whitespace there. The poster could well have included a lot of text, whitespace-encoded of course, but the /. software trimmed it away and reduced it to just the line feeds.

(And note that whitespace encoding has been used for steganography. The least noticeable way is to encode a message not as spaces and tabs, but as 1 or 2 spaces between words. Especially when viewed with a variable-width font, this is hardly visible to the eye, and will pass unnoticed in most situations. Just don't use trailing whitespace in the encoding, and it will probably work in most environments.)