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

Old news; Acme::Bleach

[apirkle]

This has been done. Damian Conway implemented it as a Perl module, Acme::Bleach, quite some time ago.

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

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? ;-)

Re:Old news; Acme::Bleach

[Adam9]

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

Is there another source?

Re:Old news; Acme::Bleach

[dieScheisse]

If you had even bothered to try, every link on 'Matt's Script Archive' takes you to the real CPAN front page.

So you're NOT screwed.

Re:Ok. Stop it.

[ChazeFroy]

The novelty of this wore off in 1998.

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.

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.

Re:Please not again...

[Zork the Almighty]

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

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: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:Please not again...

[TheRaven64]

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

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

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 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.

Re:April fools, but

[Zork the Almighty]

I thought the Gentoo one was pretty good.

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.

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.

Re:April fools, but

[lingqi]

wow... I tried it too and you are right.

I am willing to take back everything I said (and maybe put it in another post) but it's a shame /. does not allow deletions. /. with authentic story on april fools? but that can't ... [head explodes]

p.s. (pretent this was written before the exploding head) programing in this is a pain in the butt and a half, even with a hex editor.

Re:April fools, but

[Alsee]

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

Or manslaughter.

-

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!

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.)

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.

_______________
Get slashdoted at Cheap Web Site Hosting

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]

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.

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 :(

Site's down.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Here's a mirror.

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.

;^)

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

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.I f you don't have a pdf viewer, check this html rendering from google .

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.

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.

Am I the only one that actually read the link?

[Elladan]

What's with all the comments, "This is total bullsh*t! April Fools! Complete crap!" ?

Did anyone actually read the link to the whitespace language? Anyone? Hello? I mean, I know, I know, nobody on /. reads the articles, but this is ridiculous.

It's real! The description of the syntax is a masterwork of stunning proportions!

This is exactly what April Fools is supposed to be about! It's real! It's just... silly.

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;

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"?

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
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;;;;;

RPG on IBM Iron...

[tonywestonuk]

Joking asside, but if you've ever programed in RPG, Whitespace MATTERS.... Every command/Argument/Result HAS to be positioned in a certain column ...Somthing like this

C NUM1 ADD NUM2 RESULT
C MOVE 'HELLO' STR 10
C DSPLY STR

.. etc etc.

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?

an explanation..

[archen]

Not that you care, but there's a bit of history behind Matt's Script Archive (MSA). You could say MSA was one of the first Perl script archives, and certainly one of the most popular. Unfortunately you could say that many of the scripts were sort of half assed. Many of the scripts were bug prone, such as the guest book that wrote to a single text file WITHOUT file locking (thus waiting for the impending doom of 2 simultaneous writes). Others where just exploitable.

The most notorious of them all is by FAR 'formail.pl'. This is a pathetically easy script to use for evil purposes since it basically allows you to directly send crap through sendmail (ie spam) on the server - and even a basic understanding of HTML would allow a person to figure out how to do it. If you have logs on a webserver you can STILL find a lot of hits probing for formail.pl in your cgi-bin. Probably the saddest thing about MSA is the fact that it's been around forever and has thus been cataloged by every search engine out there, and as soon as someone searches for "free perl/cgi-scripts" MSA is almost always at the top of the list.

On the lighter side, if you're new to cgi and want to understand more about CGI/perl security - find a friendly Perl guru and have him/her tell you about how NOT to write CGI scripts by using the ones at MSA as an example. The humor in it is probably best known to Perl programmers as MSA is somewhat infamous in the perl world, and probably the cgi world in general.

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.

-
-
+
+
+
+
+

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: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.