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This definitely feels like cheating. There's so much one could do rather than just use the ` operator to quote the program. Given a program f, one can create a
by Smaug123 9y ago
This definitely feels like cheating. There's so much one could do rather than just use the ` operator to quote the program. Given a program f, one can create a program g which prints out g and then does f, and one does not require any special operators to do this. There's some cool computability stuff in this area, and I don't know (off the top of my head) of a readable introduction.
- asrp 9y agoI agree. Using quote is basically using the Lisp parser to do the work and is almost like reading the source program as input. It would have been interesting if their program contained a parser (which I think wouldn't be too distracting because of homoiconicity). I found this an interesting read anyways especially when they start parametrizing the quine by a function F near the end. Although my interest shouldn't be that much of a surprise given my username: asrp: a self-referential person/program/place
- kazinator 9y agoDoug H, is that you?
- tomstuart 9y agoYour observation is a consequence of Kleene's recursion theorem, which I summarised briefly in http://vimeo.com/66863570#at=13m40s http://vimeo.com/66863570#at=13m40s (extracted from chapter 8 of http://computationbook.com/ http://computationbook.com/).