Whitespace Interpreter
A language where only spaces, tabs, and newlines carry meaning — all other characters are comments. Edwin Brady & Chris Morris , 2003
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About Whitespace
Whitespace was created by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris at the University of Durham and released on 1 April 2003 — fittingly, as an April Fools' Day joke. The premise inverts every other language: only whitespace characters matter. Space, tab, and newline are the instructions; every letter, digit, and symbol is a comment. A Whitespace program can hide invisibly inside an ordinary text document, appearing to the casual reader as blank space or prose.
The language is stack-based with heap storage. Instructions are encoded as sequences of spaces (binary 0), tabs (binary 1), and newlines (terminators), grouped into five categories: stack manipulation, arithmetic, heap access, flow control, and I/O. Despite the absurd premise, Whitespace is Turing complete. The pre-loaded example in the editor above is a complete Hello, World! program — click Run to see the invisible code execute.