How to Write a Quine
2 days ago
- The author explains quines using an allegory of a machine that can create copies of itself without introspection.
- A quine is a program that prints its own source code without using introspection.
- The construction starts with a program that prints a template, then modifies it to insert a copy of itself at a placeholder.
- In Python, the quine is built using string slicing and repr() to avoid manual escaping.
- Alternative approaches include find and replace with reversed placeholders and manual escaping with careful ordering.
- The same principles apply in JavaScript and Excel, with language-specific techniques to avoid quote escaping.
- A general recipe involves creating a program template that performs find and replace with its own literal, then inserting the literal into the template.