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Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as white space insensitive language.

Fortran IV came close. You could put spaces in the middle of identifiers, keywords, and numbers, and the compiler ignored them. The language did not require spaces as separators anywhere. Spaces were only significant in Hollerith constants (what we'd call string literals today) and in columns 1-6. Columns 1-6 were reserved for line numbers, comment signifiers, and continuation marks.

Indeed, the classic resulting bug was the do loop with a typo. Instead of comma the program had a period. So this

   DO I = 1.100

was interpreted as assignment

   DOI = 1.1

Though contrary to urban legend it did not result in the loss of any rockets.

   http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/9.54.html#subj1

Aside from strings, isn’t C white space insensitive?

    intmain()
    {
        r etu rn0;
    }

The tokenizer is. `ab` is different from `a b`.

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