This segment of our computer programming language web guide is focused on the Whitespace programming language.
Whitespace is an esoteric programming language developed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris at the University of Durham.
Released on April 1 (April Fool's Day) of 2003, the language's name is an allusion to whitespace characters. While most programming languages ignore or assign little meaning to most whitespace characters, the Whitespace interpreter ignores non-whitespace characters. Only spaces, tabs, and linefeeds have meaning in Whitespace coding.
Like most esoteric languages, Whitespace was designed for artistic expression, humor, and as an intellectual challenge rather than practical use. The primary design goal of Whitespace was to explore the extreme limits of minimalistic syntax. Through the restriction of the language to whitespace characters, the creators challenged the conventional notions of programming language design.
Its inspiration may have come from Bjarne Stoustrup, the creator of C++. who facetiously suggested the concept about five years before Whitespace came about, taking the idea to the extreme by making it the sole syntax.
Since text and other characters are ignored in Whitespace, they can be used for comments.
An intriguing feature of Whitespace is its ability to create polyglots, which are programs that are valid in multiple languages. Given that Whitespace ignores non-whitespace characters, a Whitespace program can be embedded within the whitespace of another language; thus, a single text could serve as both a valid Python script and a Whitespace program.
Whitespace has no practical utility, however. It won't be powering your web applications, controlling robots, or analyzing data.
Given that the official website for the language is no longer a valid URL (it can be found on the Wayback Machine, however), Whitespace is on its way to being a dead language, although there it still has a GitHub repository with activity within the past few days, so perhaps a Whitespace Community will keep it alive.
Recommended Resources
dCode is a versatile online platform that offers a plethora of tools, solvers, and resources related to various domains. Its section on the Whitespace programming language, an esoteric language developed at the University of Durham, features an array of resources related to the language, including a collection of interpreters, compilers, and programs, archived Whitespace interpreters, and a collection housing Whitespace interpreters in thirteen programming languages.
https://www.dcode.fr/whitespace-language
Using a Wiki platform, Esolangs is a community-driven encyclopedia of esoteric programming languages, which are languages created for fun or as a challenge but generally with few, if any, real-world applications. Designed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris in 2003, Whitespace is an imperative, stack-based, esoteric programming language that uses only whitespace characters (space, tab, linefeed) as syntax. All other characters are ignored. Code examples are posted here.
https://esolangs.org/wiki/Whitespace
This is a GitHub repository for the Whitespace Corpus, a definitive collection of more than three hundred projects for the Whitespace programming language, including interpreters, compilers, transpilers, assemblers, parsers, debuggers, other utilities, and programs, along with documentation and source code, available via the MIT License. Contributors, forks, and branches may be viewed or accessed from the site, and issues and pull requests may be made or viewed.
https://github.com/wspace/corpus
GitHub: Whitespace Programming Language
GitHub hosts repositories for various software projects, such as programming languages, allowing developers or the developer community to collaborate on their development and maintenance. This is the official GitHub repository for the Whitespace programming language, including language files, documentation, source code, tooling, and other resources for the language. Currently, more than seventy repositories are associated with the language, and each of these may be accessed.
https://github.com/wspace
Tutorials Point is an e-learning platform that covers a wide range of topics in thousands of premium courses, including programming, data science, and cybersecurity. Here, the platform features an Online Wspace Compiler that provides a user-friendly platform for writing, compiling, and executing Whitespace code online. Users can write and run Whitespace programs directly in the browser and make use of an IDE in which code can be edited, saved, compiled, and shared.
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/execute_whitespace_online.php
Whitespace: A Unique Programming Language
Cratecode is a platform designed to help people master programming through a tailored, AI-assisted, community-driven learning experience. Its section on Whitespace was created through artificial intelligence, offering information and code examples for commands and instructions, control flow and stack manipulation, and Whitespace in action, ending with a brief conclusion and a FAQ that purports to answer several hypothetical questions. Links to similar articles are included.
https://cratecode.com/info/whitespace
