5 ms·

Obviously inferior to brainfuck, which uses just two characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

• katsura 6y ago
  8, not two: <>+-.,[]
  • majewsky 6y ago
    Well technically all programming languages can be encoded with just two characters. :)
• ccmcarey 6y ago
  Which is itself inferior to Whitespace [1], which uses only spaces, tabs, and linefeeds. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • allis10 6y ago
    brainfuck interpreter in Whitespace to confirm its superiority: https://allisio.xyz/bf.ws.html https://allisio.xyz/bf.ws.html Though perhaps some sicker soul has in fact written a Whitespace interpreter in brainfuck...
  • lgl 6y ago
    > (...) the Whitespace interpreter ignores any non-whitespace characters (...) A consequence of this property is that a Whitespace program can easily be contained within the whitespace characters of a program written in another language (...) making the text a polyglot. This is actually pretty brilliant as a sort of steganography in code type thing.
    • cmehdy 6y ago
      So one could write an interpreter for Whitespace along with Whitespace code to run in the interpreter, so that the interpreter interprets itself. Hard to do better at maximizing the usage of negative space!
      • lgl 6y ago
        Whoa, you just blew my mind. We need this in our lives :)
  • seba_dos1 6y ago
    I once made a language that translated directly to Whitespace, but used images as source code. Pixels where red channel had the highest value were like Whitespace's spaces, green channel - tabs, and blue channel - new lines. If the highest value was shared across multiple channels, it was ignored.