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Re:X by bufferoverflow on Thursday May 21, 2020 @07:59AM (#23257341)
Obviously inferior to brainfuck, which uses just two characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

Re:X by ccmcarey on Thursday May 21, 2020 @08:18AM (#23257501)
Which is itself inferior to Whitespace [1], which uses only spaces, tabs, and linefeeds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...

Re:X by lgl on Thursday May 21, 2020 @08:58AM (#23257807)
> (...) 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.

Re:X by cmehdy on Thursday May 21, 2020 @10:20AM (#23258650)
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!
Re:X by lgl on Thursday May 21, 2020 @02:57PM (#23263271)
Whoa, you just blew my mind. We need this in our lives :)
Re:X by allis10 on Thursday May 21, 2020 @08:38AM (#23257653)
brainfuck interpreter in Whitespace to confirm its superiority: https://allisio.xyz/bf.ws.html

Though perhaps some sicker soul has in fact written a Whitespace interpreter in brainfuck...

Re:X by seba_dos1 on Thursday May 21, 2020 @10:35PM (#23268168)
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.
Re:X by katsura on Thursday May 21, 2020 @08:02AM (#23257366)
8, not two: <>+-.,[]
Re:X by majewsky on Thursday May 21, 2020 @02:39PM (#23262919)
Well technically all programming languages can be encoded with just two characters. :)