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Hmm, when we speak of quining, we ask "How in X programming language, do we write a program that outputs it's own text". But in what language is this "program"
by adrianratnapala 10y ago
Hmm, when we speak of quining, we ask "How in X programming language, do we write a program that outputs it's own text".
But in what language is this "program" written?
The best I can guess is that the unix shebang hack/convention is a (very, very minimal) language all of its own.
- maze-le 10y agoI is not 'exactly' a quine, because the tool 'cat' is a program on its own, and not a shell command. Still, it is an entertaining and unexpected outcome.
- hkjgkjy 10y agoI'm curious to know where the line of a "program" goes. I imagine a OS without file system, but only with functions (like as if emacs was an OS). Would a function then be called a program?
- maze-le 10y agoWell, if your EmacsOS allocates exclusive adress-space for the function-call, so that it can be executed in a very own execution context, independent of other function-calls... then you could call it a program.
- khedoros 10y agoIn that definition, it seems like DOS OSes never had programs.
- jannotti 10y agoThat's not the issue, really. The issue is whether the program has access to itself as input. This one does, so it's not a quine. But it's cool.
- profmonocle 10y agoMy favorite pseudo-quine is just an empty file. Works in Bash, PHP, Node, Perl, Python, Ruby, and many others I'm sure.
- stormbrew 10y agoYeah, I would call it a quine of the binary loader, basically.