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In computer programming
Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of writing, testing, debugging/troubleshooting, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in a programming language....
, a free-form language is a programming language
Programming language

A programming language is a machine-readable artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer....
 in which the positioning of characters
Character (computing)

In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written language form of a natural language....
 on the page in program text is not significant. Program text does not need to be placed in specific columns as on old punched card systems, and frequently ends of lines are not significant. Whitespace is used to delimit tokens, and does not have other significance.

Most free-form languages descend from Algol, including C
C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language originally developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to implement the Unix operating system....
, Pascal, and Perl
Perl

In computer programming, Perl is a high-level programming language, List of programming languages by category, Interpreter , dynamic programming language....
.






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In computer programming
Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of writing, testing, debugging/troubleshooting, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in a programming language....
, a free-form language is a programming language
Programming language

A programming language is a machine-readable artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer....
 in which the positioning of characters
Character (computing)

In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written language form of a natural language....
 on the page in program text is not significant. Program text does not need to be placed in specific columns as on old punched card systems, and frequently ends of lines are not significant. Whitespace is used to delimit tokens, and does not have other significance.

Most free-form languages descend from Algol, including C
C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language originally developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to implement the Unix operating system....
, Pascal, and Perl
Perl

In computer programming, Perl is a high-level programming language, List of programming languages by category, Interpreter , dynamic programming language....
. These are also structured programming
Structured programming

Structured programming can be seen as a subset or subdiscipline of procedural programming, one of the major programming paradigms. It is most famous for removing or reducing reliance on the GOTO Statement ....
 languages, which is sometimes thought to go along with the free-form syntax: Earlier imperative programming
Imperative programming

In computer science, imperative programming is a programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of statement s that change a program state ....
 languages such as Fortran 77
Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose programming language, procedural programming language, imperative programming language programming language that is especially suited to numerical analysis and scientific computing....
 used particular columns for line numbers, which structured languages don't use or need. Lisp
Lisp programming language

Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older....
 languages are also free-form, although they do not descend from Algol. REXX
REXX

REXX is an Interpreted language programming language which was developed at IBM. It is a structured high-level programming language which was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read....
 is mostly free-form, though in some cases whitespace
Whitespace (computer science)

In computer science, whitespace is any single character or series of characters that represents horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visual mark, but typically does occupy an area on a page....
 is a concatenation
Concatenation

In computer programming, string concatenation is the operation of joining two character string end to end. For example, the strings "snow" and "ball" may be concatenated to give "snowball"....
 operator.

One recent language which has abandoned parts of the free-form idiom is Python
Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python's core syntax and semantics are Minimalism , while the standard library is large and comprehensive....
, which uses indentation with whitespace to delimit program blocks. Some critics regard this as a throwback
Throwback

Throwback may refer to:* Atavism* A retro style* Throwback uniform, variations of a sports team's uniform to resemble uniforms from that team's past, or uniforms of a defunct team...
, and find Python text harder to read and edit as it lacks the "obvious" punctuation of C or Pascal. Python aficionados, however, contend that it improves readability: since indentation is commonly used in structured languages to make block structure visible, Python's use of whitespace ensures that the two are consistent. Haskell
Haskell (programming language)

Haskell is a standardized, purely functional programming language with non-strict programming language, named after logician Haskell Curry. The goals of the language are described as:...
 also uses whitespace in this way, and does not require colons to indicate the start of a block.

See also

  • Indent style
    Indent style

    In computer programming, an indent style is a convention governing the indentation of block s of code to convey the program's structure. This article largely addresses the C and its descendants, but can be applied to most other programming languages ....
  • Obfuscated code
    Obfuscated code

    Obfuscated code is source code in a computer programming language that has been made difficult to understand. Programmers may deliberately obfuscate code to conceal its purpose, to deter reverse engineering, or as a puzzle or recreational challenge for readers....