Question

Is there (or was there ever) any non-trivial language that allows spaces in its variable names?

I am aware of the language Whitespace, but I’m interested in a language that was actually used for something besides demonstration.

I ask this out of pure curiosity.

Answer 1

In a way, yes. Several languages’s variable names are really just keys to a higher-level object. Both Coldfusion and Javascript come to mind. In Javascript, you can write foo=bar, but what you’ve really said is:

window['foo'] = bar;

You could just as easily write

window['i haz a name'] = bar;

The various scopes in Coldfusion can also be treated as either a (dict|hash|associative array) or a name.

Of course, once you’ve created a name with whitespace, it’s harder to access without using the hash lookup syntax.