The Heroic Feat of Coding in Whitespace
I have encountered one of the world’s most unreadable programming language: Whitespace. It is not your conventional language by any stretch of the imagination.
What whitespace is, is a stack-based language, which means most of the operations involve pushing and popping numbers onto a stack and being able to do arithmetic operations on it. Beyond this there are also operations that allow jumping and conditional statements, basically the equivalent of if statements and goto statements in other languages, and subroutines are also supported.
This alone, however, would not rank Whitespace as a complicated language. It would be very limited in its application – allowing nothing more complicated than a calculator program or something similar.
The real reason Whitespace is such an incomprehensible language, is that EVERYTHING is written using only white space characters. As in the characters for space, tab and linefeed. Various combinations of these characters denote the various commands.
Now, when you open a file with this code in it, it would appear as if nothing was entered at all. For a good example of how a program written in Whitespace would look, have a look at the Whitespace site.
I seriously think that some people have way too much time on their hands…
Originally posted on my old blog, Smoky Cogs, on 25 Sep 2009