Here's a little oddity I happened across. It's a patent application:

The present invention provides a system and/or method that facilitates expanding keywords within an existing computer programming language by employing a whitespace keyword containing embedded whitespace. A whitespace component can receive code, and create a whitespace keyword based at least upon a successive comparison of adjacent tokens. The whitespace component creates a whitespace keyword by replacing more than one token with a single token containing embedded whitespace. Moreover, the whitespace component can utilize a lexical analyzer to group code into tokens and a parser component to parse the code.

This actually makes sense to me (assuming you accept that the idea of software patents in general makes sense.) It was a huge leap to take a language like C++, where keywords are separated by spaces, and extend it to become a language where some of the keywords actually contain spaces. After all, so many of us already have words like ref and value as variable names: the only way for C++/CLI to work is the conceptual leap that says "ref isn't the keyword, ref class is the keyword." If you wonder how that's actually done... read the patent application.

Kate