The Whitespace Programming Language

Welcome to the Whitespace page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

This article was written by:

• rzuckerm

Description

According to Wikipedia, Whitespace is an esoteric language developed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris in 2002 at the University of Durham. According to the Esolang Wiki, a post to Slashdot about the language was done on April 1, 2003. Most people assumed it was a joke. However, it was not.

Unlike other languages where whitespace characters are either ignored or used as a separator between tokens, Whitespace uses these characters as instructions. All instructions are made up of 3 whitespace characters:

• space (ASCII code 32)
• tab (ASCII code 9)
• linefeed (ASCII code 10), also called newline

Everything else is ignored, so non-whitespace characters can be used as comments or to annotate the program. A common practice is to add a letter indicating the whitespace character before that character:

• S for space
• T for tab
• L for linefeed

For example, here is the code to output the letter H:

S S S T	S S T	S S S L
T	L
T	L
S S 

Wikipedia indicates that Whitespace is an imperative, stack-based language. It also has a "heap", which is actually just memory storage to an arbitrary address. There are instructions for the following:

• Stack manipulation
• Arithmetic
• Heap access
• Flow control
• I/O

Numbers are of arbitrary length and are represented like this:

• Sign bit: space (0) for positive, tab (1) for negative
• Binary representation of the absolute value of the number, most-significant bit first: space for 0, tab for 1
• Terminated with a linefeed

For example, 100 (110 0100) would be represented as this:

sign	1	1	0	0	1	0	0	term
space	tab	tab	space	space	tab	space	space	linefeed

For further information on the Whitespace language, see the official tutorial. Since creating a Whitespace program is very tedious, you can use a Whitespace assembler instead.

Articles

There are 4 articles:

• Baklava in Whitespace
• Fizz Buzz in Whitespace
• Hello World in Whitespace
• Quine in Whitespace