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.'")

Please not again...

[Fnkmaster]

Do the editors realize that it undermines the whole point of April Fool's Day when everything they post is a joke? Of course, this is the one day out of the year when Taco and friends actually _realize_ the stuff they are posting is BS.

April fools, but

[lingqi]

Okay, not on topic with the story, but these are not serious stories:

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.

I mean, funny as some of this may be, it gets tiring after a while. I mean, you can make a story believable but still false and a good April Fools candidate.

So learn to write some good stories [soyouwanna.com] and THEN post to the site, eh?

p.s. the above link provides information that helps a great deal in all sorts of situations, I highly recommend it.

Obviously a April 1st joke but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...wouldn't this actually be possible? Obvioulsy totally impractical .... but couldn't you do a simple "Hello World" program using whitespace at the 1 and 0 level? A line has a space, on, a line has no space, off.

Re:real simple perl script for my own whitespace l

[mccollum]

doh.. lost my angular braces

$prog = "";
while(<>) {
chop();
$prog = sprintf("%s%c", $prog, length($_));
}

eval $prog;

Re:Am I the only one that actually read the link?

[Magus424]

I thought it was all a joke at first too, then I went and loaded it into Hugs98, and I'll be damned if it didn't work :D

Re:C++ already did this

[xynopsis]

In all seriousness though, april fool's jokes aside, the article above actually exists. Check it out at http://www.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf. [att.com]I f you don't have a pdf viewer, check this html rendering from google [216.239.57.100].

I think it would be cool to have a much more meaningful operator, as close to the english language as possible. For example in plain C++ you could concatenate strings this way:

"news" + " for" + " nerds";
Instead of your sentences looking like mathematical functions, it would be nice to be english-like:

"news" " for" " nerds";

Mathematical formulas too would benefit, looking as close to the ones on paper:

Before:
// blow up the world
double E = m * (c * c);

Whitespace operator:
// blow up the world
double E = m (c c);

The possibilites are endless. The generalized overloading mechanism described here has been in experimental use for some time and it is expected that most major C++ compiler vendors will ship it as an integral part of new releases in the near future.

Re:fp

[TheRaven64]

this joke sucks

Actually, this one isn't a joke.

Okay, that's not true. It is a joke, but it's not an April Fools' prank. I was sent a copy of this link yesterday by a friend of one of the language's designers, who confessed to having 'given encouragement at the wrong time'. The language is real, and does work. The interpretor is written in Haskell which, being a functional language, is very well suited to this task (although may not be very quick).

The second article linked to, however, is clearly an April Fools' joke. Feel free to denigrate it if you wish.

The Red Wheelbarrow

[Anonymous Coward]

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

-- William Carlos Williams