Whitespace ⬜

Years ago, I read about the Whitespace language. The only significant characters are space, tab and line feed. Everything else is a comment. On Saturday it crossed my mind again, so I read the tutorial and thought "Seems like a do-able thing." So I wrote a Whitespace interpreter.

Wikipedia article

How did I get on?

The documentation is ambiguous, but that's even admitted at the top of the page.

I can't install the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, which I wanted so I could try the canonical version. I think it didn't work because I have Cygwin and that interfered with the MinGW it installed. I have a Linux VM, but not of a flavour supported by GHC.

The interpreter wasn't so hard to write. There's a stack, a heap, and 24 instructions. Arbitrarily large integers was a surprise, but now I can calculate 100,000 factorial. I tried a million, but it took over 6 minutes and the result didn't fit into my 9000 line screen buffer.

Writing code in Whitespace is hard, and only partly because it's all white space. Mostly it's hard because it's machine code for a 24-instruction processor. I had to write it out assembler-style so that I could reason about what it would do without worrying about the daft encoding, then put in the actual instructions later. I may have been cheating though, because I used an editor that lets me display tabs and spaces.

If I have to write in assembler, hand-coding that to actual Whitespace is kind of annoying. But if I wrote an assembler program to generate Whitespace, I've abstracted away the fact that it's weirdly encoded, and that makes the whole thing a bit pointless.

What's missing in Whitespace

A language with no file I/O is annoying. Instructions could be added to the I/O Instruction Modification Parameter, [Tab][LF], to open, close, read and write a file.

There's no way to pass parameters to a Whitespace program.

There's no way to call into any other code outside the current program, so you can't use any kind of library.

So writing a Gemini client in Whitespace would be tricky.

Did I enjoy myself?

I found that when I was doing other things, my mind strayed back to this all weekend. It was a fun excercise.

#Whitespace

#programming

back to gemlog