JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

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Sat, 26 Jan 2008 07:49:22 GMT

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re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

Eric Lippert — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 17:00:00 GMT

CJ: Since I don't know what statement you're disagreeing with, it's hard to formulate a reply. :-)

re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

Gavin Greig — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:21:00 GMT

Interesting that a self-reproducing program should be called a quine - in the North East of Scotland, a quine is a girl (and a loon is a boy). It's from the same Old English root as "queen".

re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

Macneil — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 03:32:00 GMT

Of course, the empty file (when accepted by the PL as valid; although it lacks any instructions) is the shortest program that outputs itself.

re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

C.J. Collier — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 05:25:00 GMT

Heya Eric,

I disagree. Unless you do not consider a program that outputs the source code of *another* program a quine.

I was working on the Cocoa# project writing just such a tool to generate C, C++ and C Sharp code equivalents when sourcing an Objective C .m file.

The whole thing was written in Perl.

Since Scarlet was born, I haven't had as much time to maintain it, and the other project devs have rewritten it in C#.

If this definition sticks, I would consider any compiler a "quine" as well, as it genrates computer-readable code from human readable code.

Okay. That was just the first couple of paragraph. I'm going back under :)

re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

Sjoerd Visscher — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:08:00 GMT

I think this is a 92 character quine uncle of the 97 character quine (if I understand quine uncle right):

q="'",d='"',a='"q="+d+q+d+",d="+q+d+q+",a="+q+a+q+","+a','q="'+q+d+",d='"+d+"',a='"+a+"',"+a

re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

Sjoerd Visscher — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:54:00 GMT

Oops, ignore that one.

re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

Sjoerd Visscher — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:50:00 GMT

95:

q="'",d='"',w=q+d,a='"q="+d+w+",d="+w+q+",a="+q+a+q+","+a',"q="+d+w+",d="+w+q+",a="+q+a+q+","+a

re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

Sjoerd Visscher — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:25:00 GMT

This one is a modification of lioreans script:

q="'",d='"',a='"q="+d+q+d+",d="+q+d+q+",a="+q+a+q+","+a',"q="+d+q+d+",d="+q+d+q+",a="+q+a+q+","+a

It's 97 characters.

re: JScript, DNA, and Mad Cow Disease

Macneil — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:42:00 GMT

Well, as long as the language is Turing complete without the extra library functions, and it has the required string class, the recursion theorem says that any computation you can imagine can also obtain its own description.

Actually, you don't even need strings, all you need is to output some representation of the program, so an array of integer ASCII values is also fine.

Using the recursion theorem, the program can be very easy to understand, though it produces results a little longer than the short-cut versions.