Evolution of "Hello World!"

Question

This contest is officially over, the winner is jimmy23013. Congratulations!

The challenge is to make a program that prints Hello World! to stdout. The catch is that your program must have a Levenshtein distance of 7 or less from the program in the answer submitted before yours.

How This Will Work

Below I have already submitted the first answer using Python: print("Hello World!").

The next person to answer must modify the string print("Hello World!") with up to 7 single character insertions, deletions, or substitutions so that when it is run in any language that hasn't been used so far (only Python in this case) the output is still Hello World!.

For example the second answerer might use 1 substitution (r -> u), 2 deletions (in), and 1 insertion (s) to make the string puts("Hello World!") which prints Hello World! when run in Ruby.

The third person to answer must do the same thing in a new language, but using the program of the second person's answer (e.g. puts("Hello World!")) as their starting point. The fourth answer will be in relation to the third answer and so on.

This will continue on until everyone get stuck because there is no new language the last answer's program can be made to run in by only changing 7 characters. The communal goal is to see how long we can keep this up, so try not to make any obscure or unwarranted character edits (this is not a requirement however).

Formatting

Please format your post like this:

# Answer N - [language]

    [code]

[notes, explanation, observations, whatever]

Where N is the answer number (increases incrementally, N = 1, 2, 3,...).

You do not have to tell which exact characters were changed. Just make sure the Levenshtein distance is from 0 to 7.

Rules

The key thing to understand about this challenge is that only one person can answer at a time and each answer depends on the one before it.

There should never be two answers with the same N. If two people happen to simultaneously answer for some N, the one who answered later (even if it's a few seconds difference) should graciously delete their answer.

Furthermore...

• A user may only submit one answer per 8 hour period. i.e. Each of your answers must be at least 8 hours apart. (This is to prevent users from constantly watching the question and answering as much as possible.)
• A user may not submit two answers in a row. (e.g. since I submitted answer 1 I can't do answer 2, but I could do 3.)
• Each answer must be in a different programming language.
  • Different versions of the same language count as the same language.
  • Languages count as distinct if they are traditionally called by two different names. (There may be some ambiguities here but don't let that ruin the contest.)
• You may only use tabs, newlines, and printable ASCII. (Newlines count as one character.)
• The output should only be Hello World! and no other characters (a leading/trailing newline is not an issue).
• If your language doesn't has stdout use whatever is commonly used for quickly outputting text (e.g. console.log or alert in JavaScript).

Please make sure your answer is valid. We don't want to realize there's a break in the chain five answers up. Invalid answers should be fixed quickly or deleted before there are additional answers.

Don't edit answers unless absolutely necessary.

Scoring

Once things settle down, the user who submits the most (valid) answers wins. Ties go to the user with the most cumulative up-votes.

Leaderboard: (out of date)

(user must have at least 2 valid answers)

11 Answers

• Optimizer - CJam, Groovy, HTML, Forth, Rebol, Markdown, CASIO BASIC, SpeakEasy, REXX, RegXy, Pawn
• jimmy23013 - GNU dc, Zsh, Burlesque, bc, Hack, GDB, QBasic, MediaWiki Markup, itflabtijtslwi, Squirrel, AGOL 68

7 Answers

• Nit - APL, Clipper, Falcon, MUMPS, FreeBASIC, csh, Dart
• Timmy - Lua, Lisp, Oz, Algoid, KTurtle, Alice, OCaml

6 Answers

• Stacey - VHDL, GNU Octave, M4, Logo, Microsoft Batch, Matlab
• Dennis - Dash, tcsh, TeX, ///, HQ9+-, Alore

5 Answers

• plannapus - Stata, Scheme, SQLite, Scala, Suneido
• Pietu1998 - PHP, sh, ALAGUF, Cardinal, Grin

4 Answers

• ypnypn - NetLogo, Mouse, Salmon, Maple
• resueman - Clojure, Emacs Lisp, Vimscript, VBScript
• Timtech - AutoLisp, Geom++, BogusForth, owl

3 Answers

• BrunoJ - CoffeeScript, F#, Betterave

2 Answers

• Mig - Extended BF Type III, TCL
• Calvin's Hobbies - Python, E
• Sp3000 - Racket, Pyth
• grc - Haskell, Turing
• es1024 - Nimrod, ksh
• FireFly - FALSE, mIRC script
• g-rocket - AppleScript, LiveCode
• Oriol - AMPL, PARI/GP
• nneonneo - Boo, Caché ObjectScript

Languages used so far:

1. Python
2. CJam
3. PHP
4. Pyth
5. Perl
6. Befunge 98
7. Bash
8. Nimrod
9. Ruby
10. GNU dc
11. Golfscript
12. Mathematica
13. R
14. Lua
15. Sage
16. Julia
17. Scilab
18. JavaScript
19. VHDL
20. HyperTalk
21. Haskell
22. LOLCODE
23. APL
24. M30W
25. Stata
26. TI-BASIC (NSpire)
27. ActionScript 2
28. J
29. PowerShell
30. K
31. Visual FoxPro
32. VBA
33. Extended BF Type III
34. Zsh
35. Dash
36. Clojure
37. NetLogo
38. Groovy
39. CoffeeScript
40. Clipper
41. B.A.S.I.C.
42. FALSE
43. fish (shell)
44. GNU Octave
45. TCL
46. E
47. newLisp
48. Lisp
49. SMT-LIBv2
50. Racket
51. Batsh
52. tcsh
53. AppleScript
54. Mouse
55. Pixie
56. F#
57. Falcon
58. Burlesque
59. HTML
60. SGML
61. M4
62. MUMPS
63. TeX
64. Forth
65. Salmon
66. Turing
67. bc
68. Betterave
69. Scheme
70. Emacs Lisp
71. Logo
72. AutoLISP
73. ///
74. Rebol
75. Maple
76. FreeBASIC
77. Vimscript
78. ksh
79. Hack
80. mIRC
81. Batch
82. Make
83. Markdown
84. sh
85. GDB
86. csh
87. HQ9+-
88. Postscript
89. Matlab
90. Oz
91. CASIO BASIC
92. VBScript
93. QBasic
94. Processing
95. C
96. Rust 0.13
97. Dart
98. Kaffeine
99. Algoid
100. AMPL
101. Alore
102. Forobj
103. T-SQL
104. LiveCode
105. Euphoria
106. SpeakEasy
107. MediaWiki
108. SmallBASIC
109. REXX
110. SQLite
111. TPP
112. Geom++
113. SQL (postgres)
114. itflabtijtslwi
115. RegXy
116. Opal.rb
117. Squirrel
118. Pawn
119. Scala
120. Rebmu
121. Boo
122. PARI/GP
123. Red
124. Swift
125. BeanShell
126. Vala
127. Pike
128. Suneido
129. AWK
130. Neko
131. AngelScript
132. gosu
133. V
134. ALAGUF
135. BogusForth
136. Flaming Thunder
137. Caché ObjectScript
138. owl
139. Cardinal
140. Parser
141. Grin
142. Kitten
143. TwoDucks
144. Asymptote
145. CAT
146. IDL
147. Tiny
148. WTFZOMFG
149. Io
150. MuPAD
151. Java
152. Onyx
153. JBoss
154. S+
155. Hexish
156. yash
157. Improbable
158. wake
159. brat
160. busybox built-in shell
161. gammaplex
162. KTurtle
163. AGOL 68
164. Alice
165. SML/NJ
166. OCaml
167. CDuce
168. Underload
169. Simplex v.0.6
170. Minkolang 0.9
171. Fexl 7.0.3
172. Jolf
173. Vitsy
174. Y
175. Retina
176. Codename Dragon
177. Seriously
178. Reng v.3.3
179. Fuzzy Octo Guacamole
180. 05AB1E

^{(Feel free to edit these lists if they are incorrect or out of date.)}

This question works best when you sort by oldest.

NOTE: This is a trial question for a new challenge type I have in mind where each answer depends on the last and increases in difficulty. Come discuss it with us in the chatroom for this question or in meta.

Answer 1

Answer 1 - Python

print("Hello World!")

There's got to be dozens of languages this could morph into.

Answer 2

Answer 59 - HTML

What? No HTML ??

<echo o[.]c;cat<<;#&&alert" ">Hello World!</vsh

Distance from Answer 58 : 6

Voodoo Magic ? Nah. Here is how it works:

You can have any arbitrary tag in HTML, so the first part <echo o[.]c;cat<<;#&&alert" "> is an echo tag, which now becomes a blank tag with no CSS applied by default by the browser.

The o[.]c;cat<<;#&&alert" " part is actually two properties set on that tag separated by space. So the first property has the key o[.]c;cat<<;#&&alert" and second key is " and both the values are blank.

Second part is just plain text Hello World! which is the text contents of the echo tag.

Next up, HTML tries to find the closing echo tag, but instead, finds a closing vsh tag. It then ignores the closing vsh tag (i.e. </vsh) and auto closes the echo tag.

Answer 3

Answer 95 - C

//[]([.]c;
main()    {
    puts("Hello World!");}
//#[;]#bye;dnl</>

Distance 7 from answer 94

Answer 4

Answer 85 - GDB (GNU Debugger)

#[]([.]c;main()&alert"  "
    echo Hello World!
#[;]:;#bye;dnl</vsh>

I think this can also be qualified as a programming language. It has even if and while commands.

echo is another built in command in GDB.

To run this code:

gdb --batch -x file

Distance: 7 from answer 84.

Answer 5

Answer 151 - Java

//#
class jux{public static void main(String[] h){System.out.println(//;\#//Hello*}}print,
"Hello World!");}}//print"putsx;//-##[;]#bye</>%"

Distance from Answer 150 : 7

Try it here

(Thanks to Christopher Creutzig for being such a sport :) )

Answer 6

Answer 22 - LOLCODE

VISIBLE "Hello World!"

Distance : 6

Answer 7

Answer 10 - GNU dc

[puts "\x48][Hello World!]p

Distance: 6

Answer 8

Answer 4 - Pyth

"Hello World!

This answer is a distance of 6 from the previous answer. Pyth strings do not need a closing quote if they are at the end of a line.

Answer 9

Answer 11 - Golfscript

#[puts "\x48]
"Hello World!"

A distance of 5.

Answer 10

Answer 83 - Markdown

What ?? No Markdown ? :P

[](#[.]c;cat;#&&alert"  "
    @echo)Hello World!
[;]:;#bye;dnl</vsh>

Try it here

Distance from Answer 82 : 7

e   -> [
:   -> ]
\n  -> (
o H -> o)H
:   -> [
#   -> ]
"   -> :

Voodoo magic ?? Nah!! Here is how it works:

• [text](link) creates a link.

So the first part of the code is

[](#[.]c;cat;#&&alert"  "
        @echo)

Which creates an empty text link with location

#[.]c;cat;#&&alert"  "
     @echo

• Next part Hello World! is printed as is

• Then [;]:;#bye;dnl</vsh> creates a reference link for ; which can be used anywhere in the markdown.

Ex:

[Some text][;] // Outputs a link with text "Some text" and url ";#bye;dnl</vsh>"

Answer 11

Answer 15 - Sage

print("Hello World!")

Distance = 6

Full circle.

Answer 12

Answer 12 - Mathematica

#[puts];
"Hello World!"

Distance of 7. Attempting to clear up some of that mess.

Answer 13

Answer 2 – CJam

"Hello World!"

This is a distance of 7 from the first answer

Try it online here

Answer 14

Answer 6 - Befunge 98

<@,kb"Hello World!"

Distance of 5 from the previous answer. There was originally a bug where the k wasn't there; I know it was there when I wrote this program, though. I guess it just didn't make it into this post.

Answer 15

Answer 19 - VHDL

report "Hello World!";

Distance: 6

Answer 16

Answer 3 – PHP

<?="Hello World!"?>

This answer is a distance 5 from the second answer.

Answer 17

Answer 23 - APL

 "Hello World!"

Note there's a leading space.
Distance: 7

Answer 18

Answer 5 - Perl

print"Hello World!"

This answer is a distance 6 from the fourth answer.

Answer 19

Answer 7 - Bash

echo Hello World!

This is a distance of 7 from the sixth answer.

Answer 20

Answer 28 - J

]trace=:('Hello World!')

Distance = 5 from Answer 27

Answer 21

Answer 33 - Extended BF Type III

a#="*#[.>]trac": "@Hello World!

Distance 7 from Answer 32

Well, I have not found an interpreter for that extension but the code seems to fit the specs of the language.

a //ignored
#="*# //comment
[.>] //print each character until an empty cell
trac" //ignored
: //move pointer, do not impact result
 " //ignored
@ //end of source
Hello World! //Injected in cells before execution

Answer 22

Answer 100 - AMPL

#[][.]#i
#main()    {
    print("Hello World!");
#[;]#bye;dnl</>

Distance 6 from Answer 99

Answer 23

Answer 8 - Nimrod

echo "\x48ello World!"

Distance of 6 from the last answer.

Answer 24

Answer 14 - Lua

#[put
print("Hello World!")

Distance = 7

Answer 25

Answer 21 - Haskell

putStrLn "Hello World!"

Distance: 7

Answer 26

Answer 26 - TI-BASIC (NSpire)

Disp "Hello World!"

Distance: 5 from answer 25

(Tested on a TI-NSpire calculator)

Answer 27

Answer 29 - MS Windows Powershell

#]trace=:(
'Hello World!'

Distance = 3 from Answer 28

Answer 28

Answer 42 - FALSE

{#ah="*#[.>]trac";cat<<@
#&&alert 
?} "Hello World!
"

Levenshtein distance from #41 is 7. Tested with this online implementation of FALSE. I used some leftover edit-distance slots to remove some cruft...

Answer 29

Answer 150 - MuPAD

//#class jux{public static void main(String[] h){System.out.println(;\#//Hello*}}print,
"Hello World!"//print"putsx;//-##[;]#bye</>%"

Distance 6 from answer 149.

EDIT: Added “ h” to move the chain forward.

Answer 30

Answer 30 - K

/#]trac
"Hello World!"

Distance: 7 from Answer 29

I think this works, an interpreter is here (Kona). / begins a one-line comment in K. I've cleaned up some of the #]trace=:( mess.