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For a free-form language, whitespace characters are ignored by code processors (i.e. compiler). Even when language syntax requires white space, often multiple whitespace characters are treated the same as a single. In an off-side rule language, indentation white space is syntactically significant.
White space in code is typically stored as whitespace characters. For a free-form language, indentation is exclusively for the programmer since a code processor (i.e. compiler, interpreter) ignores whitespace characters. Code can have inconsistent or even no indentation, but in general is formatted with somewhat consistent indentation.
In computer programming, indentation style is a convention, a.k.a. style, governing the indentation of blocks of source code.An indentation style generally involves consistent width of whitespace (indentation size) before each line of a block, so that the lines of code appear to be related, and dictates whether to use space or tab characters for the indentation whitespace.
A free-format language ignores whitespace characters: spaces, tabs and new lines so the programmer is free to style the code in different ways without affecting the meaning of the code. Generally, the programmer uses style that is considered to enhance readability. The two code snippets below are the same logically, but differ in whitespace.
Most free-form languages descend from ALGOL, including C, Pascal, and Perl. Lisp languages are free-form, although they do not descend from ALGOL. Rexx and its dialects ooRexx and NetRexx are mostly free-form, though in some cases whitespace characters are concatenation operators. SQL, though not a full programming language, is also free-form.
These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute. Minification reduces the size of the source code, making its transmission over a network (e.g. the Internet) more efficient.
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WhiteSpace is a Unicode character property specified in the Unicode Character Database. This template's initial visibility currently defaults to expanded , meaning that it is fully visible. To change this template's initial visibility, the |state= parameter may be used: