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

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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