Ruby Hello World

helloworld

      = 1
      =  + 
      =   *  + 
      =    *  
      = 
      [      *(   +  )+  , 
             =     *    + , 
             =     *    +    -  , 
            , 
            =        +    ,
        *  +    +  , 
        *    -  *    +   +  , 
           , 
           + +  , 
            , 
        *    ,     + +  , 
        ]
puts      .map(&:chr).join

That is not valid Ruby, failure on first line.

∴ irb
>>       = 1
SyntaxError: (irb):1: syntax error, unexpected '='
      = 1
       ^

I am sure it is based on something that did work for someone somehow, anyone know how to fix it?

@pboling Yes, you need to ensure that you're actually feeding the invisible unicode characters to the interpreter; you may be inadvertently stripping them during the copy-and-paste. (It appears that some or all online interpreters do this.) See this StackOverflow question.

It would be interesting to know if there are particular versions of Ruby that don't treat special whitespace unicode points as valid identifier characters. I think a Ruby feature-request to make future versions of Ruby treat all unicode whitespace as real whitespace (i.e. assume it indicates a separation between two tokens but otherwise ignore it) would probably be helpful.

Nice! Here's a readability trick:

ruby -p -e '$_.gsub!(/ +/," ").gsub!(/\u00a0+/){|m| "v#{m.size}"}' < helloworld 

prints

v1 = 1
v2 = v1+v1
v3 = v2*v2+v1
v4 = v3*v2
v5 = 
 [v4 *(v3+v2)+v2, 
 v7 = v4*v4+v1, 
 v8 = v4*v4+v4-v2, 
 v8, 
 v7 = v7+v4,
 v4*v2+v4+v2, 
 v4*v4-v2*v4+v3+v2, 
 v7, 
 v7+v1+v2, 
 v8, 
 v4*v4, v4+v1+v2, 
 v4]
puts v5.map(&:chr).join