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: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...

[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.

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

[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.

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!

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?

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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.

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: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.