Whitespace is the collective name given to spaces (blanks), horizontal and vertical tabs, newline characters, and comments. Whitespace can serve to indicate where tokens start and end, but beyond this function, any surplus whitespace is discarded. For example, the two sequences below are lexically equivalent

Example:

time tau mwpulse 45ns

Legend: PPL keywords; PPL pulse commands; comments.

and

Example:

time tau mwpulse 45ns

Legend: PPL keywords; PPL pulse commands; comments.