Perfecting Nothingness by Refactoring Whitespace

In this paper we explore the possibilities of refactoring code in Whitespace, a programming language which only recognises whitespace characters as code, and tolerates textual comments that describe the program. The paper presents a list of possible refactorings applicable to Whitespace, and describes a tool that automates some of these refactorings. The functionality of the tool is demonstrated with concrete examples. Refactoring is a important systematic process of improving code without creating new functionality, improving long-termproperties of the code such as readability, maintainability, changeability, testability, extendability and safety. We argue that,despite the lack of real-life applications for Whitespace specifically, it is beneficial to apply refactoring methodology to it,since lessons learnt from esoteric languages can be ported elsewhere — in this case, to assemblers and similarly restrictive software languages.