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.'")

Comments

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:Please not again...

[Zork the Almighty]

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

C++ already did this

[edhall]

Bjarne Stroustrup wrote a paper 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

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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