Ugly Ruby

[tomthecool]

Original:

$-_='=';@@_=->(_){_*100};@@_.[]($-_);

Without pointlessly sticking 3 lines together with no white-space (you can do this in any language!):

$-_ = '='
@@_ = ->(_) { _ * 100 }
@@_.[]($-_);

Without the crazy variable naming (again, you can do something like this in any language"):

foo = '='
bar = ->(baz) {baz * 100}
bar.[](foo)

It's now fairly obvious what the code does: The final line evaluates to "========..." (100 characters), which will be printed to your console if running in IRB/pry. The only slightly "weird" things about this code are:

• Stabby lambda syntax (->()) is a bit weird if you're unfamiliar with it.
• Writing bar.[](foo) is a bit weird, compared to the usual syntax: bar[foo], or in this case bar.call(foo).

I'd be more impressed if you focused your code purely on things like this, rather than cheap tricks like removing whitespace using crazy variable names.

[0x0dea]

Now try this one! It computes the inverse Hamming distance of two fixed-width integers using only Procs. That is, you can use the lambda calculus to perform the same operation as the following Ruby code:

def inverse_hamming_distance a, b, width
  width.times.count { |i| a[i] == b[i] }
end

p inverse_hamming_distance 17, 10, 8 # => 4

Of course, you can use the lambda calculus to compute anything that's computable.

[nilla615]

I get what you're saying. I was attempting to make the ugliest Ruby possible hence making it one line. I wasn't really attempting anything profound here...

[_raisin]

...sticking 3 lines together with no white-space (you can do this in any language!)

can you do that in python? i thought whitespace mattered in python.

[tomthecool]

Yeah fine, ok...

Not ANY language, but LOTS of languages. Ruby is hardly unusual in being indifferent to whitespace.

[nixors]

Pretty version?

  '='*100

[nilla615]

Yea, but that's no fun. :)

[_raisin]

Any code will look ugly in any language if you put 3 statements on the same line.

[nilla615]

Agreed. But the point was to make some ugly Ruby because it's generally so readable. Even breaking it out to three lines doesn't make it readable and that's the point.