News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A Quine in Fortran 90. Parent comment

Re:A Quine in Fortran 90 by verandaguy on Monday December 07, 2015 @10:52AM (#10690144)
I didn't mean that you could output to a file -- I meant that, knowing the name of the file the program is saved to (which is possible using facilities available in many modern languages, not sure about Fortran), you can ingest that file and print out its contents (to STDOUT for example).

It feels like cheating, but it's also probably the easiest way to get a true quine which'll always work even if you modify parts of the code (while retaining the part of the program which ingests and prints out the file's contents).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Quine in Fortran 90 by pmav on Monday December 07, 2015 @10:59AM (#10690187)
I had the same feeling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29#.22Cheat...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Quine in Fortran 90 by gliese1337 on Monday December 07, 2015 @12:02PM (#10690705)
Many years ago, I attempted to cheat this way when writing a JScript quine- but it didn't work because the Windows Scripting Host keeps the source file open while interpreting it, which meant the script couldn't open its own source file because the file was already open in another program!

A proper quine, though, doesn't require input.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Quine in Fortran 90 by orph4nus on Monday December 07, 2015 @12:17PM (#10690804)
A multiquine does require you to give input in order to determine what language to output. Although it will output the current file if no input is giving. More info @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Multiquines
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Quine in Fortran 90 by gliese1337 on Monday December 07, 2015 @12:36PM (#10691008)
The definition of a multiquine specifically disallows passing in source code as input, though. The input to a multiquine is strictly for selecting which sub-quine to run, or which output set to calculate, and is not used in any way to influence the calculation of the selected output.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Quine in Fortran 90 by randlet on Monday December 07, 2015 @10:59AM (#10690180) 

    #!/usr/bin/env python2.7
    print open(__file__, 'r').read()
Seems like cheating!
[ Parent | on HN ]