Whitespacy

Whitespacy is a polyglot formatter, written in Python, for the C and Whitespace programming languages.

It takes as input a valid C file and a valid Whitespace file, and produces, as output, a polyglot file that is valid in both C and Whitespace, while behaving exaclty like the inputs when interpreted/compiled.

Whitespacy also includes minic.py, a simple C-minifier.

But why ?

The goal of the project was to demonstrate that it is possible to embbed a fully functionnal Whitespace program within the whitespace characters ( , \t and \n) of a program written in another language.

Is it useless ? For sure. Is it trivial ? Hell no.

Dependencies

Whitespacy only uses the standard libraries of Python. However, if you wish to compile the C files, you will need a C compiler like gcc or clang.

To interpret the Whitespace files, I have used an online Whitespace interpreter.

Example

Let's take as inputs this (nice) "Hello, World!" C program

#include <stdio.h>

#define NICE 69420

int isNice(int x) {
    return x == NICE;
}

/* tricky quote " */
#define min(x, y) \
((x) < (y) ? (x) : (y))

int main() {
    printf("Hello, World!\n");

    if (isNice(3 * 4 * 5 * min(13, 31) * 89))
        printf("nice.\n");

    /* tricky //
       string */
    if (0)
        printf("/* */ \" // \
        ");

    return 0; // no error
}

and a basic "Hello, World!" Whitespace program (see hello-world.ws).

Then, running the command

$ python whitespacy.py hello-world.c hello-world.ws -o polyglot.c

produces the polyglot.c file

 #             include<stdio.h>
    
#  define            NICE       69420
    
 int isNice(int x)      {            return x==NICE;}
    
# define min(x , y)( (x)<(y )?      (x):(y)   )
    
                            
    
                  
    
int main( )   {   printf("Hello,\x20World!\n" )  
    
  ;if(isNice(3*                 4*5*        
min(13,31   
  ) *89)) printf("nice.\n")     ;if  (          0   )printf
    ("/*\x20*/\x20\"\x20//\x20\x20\x20\x20\x20\x20\x20\x20\x20")
 ; return 0                  
    ;
                      
    
                  
    
                
    
  


}

which, can be compiled with gcc (clang)

$ gcc polyglot.c -o polyglot
$ ./polyglot
Hello, World!
nice.

or interpreted in Whitespace:

Hello, world!

It should be noted that the output of whitespacy.py is different for each execution, as (part of) the formatting is randomly generated.