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In most programming language syntax, whitespace characters can be used to separate tokens. 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.
As a consequence of its syntax, Whitespace source code can be contained within the whitespace of code written in a language that ignores whitespace – making the text a polyglot. [2] Whitespace is an imperative, stack-based language. The programmer can push arbitrary-width integer values onto a stack and access a heap to store data.
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.
Lisp and other S-expression-based languages do not differentiate statements from expressions, and parentheses are enough to control the scoping of all statements within the language. As in curly bracket languages, whitespace is mostly ignored by the reader (i.e., the read function). Whitespace is used to separate tokens. [5]
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.
The characters which are considered whitespace varies between programming languages and implementations. For example, C traditionally only counts space, tab, line feed, and carriage return characters, while languages which support Unicode typically include all Unicode space characters.
These unnecessary characters usually include whitespace 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.
A snippet of Java code with keywords highlighted in bold blue font. The syntax of Java is the set of rules defining how a Java program is written and interpreted. The syntax is mostly derived from C and C++. Unlike C++, Java has no global functions or variables, but has data members which are also regarded as global variables.