polyglot programming

2 responses to “polyglot programming”

1. 

   April 28, 2007

   Steven Den Beste

   There was a C program I saw about 30 years ago which, when compiled and run, would print out its own source.

   That’s a hell of a lot tougher than it sounds. The trick in that case was careful (ab)use of macros.
2. 

   April 28, 2007

   fledgling otaku

   Steven, that is called a _quine_ – check out “the original post”:http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/true_pathology_a_multilingual.php and comments at Good Math, Bad Math for many more examples. There’s even an entire programming language where “the only way to loop is to quine the program”:http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/friday_pathological_programmin_5.php! Cool but esoteric 🙂

   Here’s a link to quines in all the major programming languages. And here’s a simple quine in C:

   #include
main(){char*c="\\\"#include%cmain(){char*c=%c%c%c%.102s%cn%c;
printf(c+2,c[102],c[1],*c,*c,c,*c,c[1]);exit(0);}\n";printf(c+2,c[102],c[1],*c,*c,c,*c,c[1]);exit(0);}