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Talk:Quine: Difference between revisions
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The name of the task is '''Quine'''. A Quine is not allowed to open its source file and to copy it to standard output. All implementations which do this should be removed. [[User:194.48.84.1|194.48.84.1]] 05:56, 20 November 2007 (MST)
The task states (perhaps not clearly enough) that the program itself should do the printing, not any toplevel read-eval-print loop, or equivalent. Otherwise, all constants in languages that have such a toplevel would be quines. But that is completely missing the point of the original problem, which (as explained for example in the book ''Gödel, Escher, Bach'') is about self-application, and quoting. -- [[User:DirkT|Dirk Thierbach]] 21 November 2007
:I clarified the task. Different scenarios have different requirements for output. The Lisp example satisfied the spirit of the task (produce a usable reproduction of one's own code), so the task itself needed to be adjusted. I won't take that approach in all cases; It's a matter of the spirit of the task. --[[User:Short Circuit|Short Circuit]] 13:06, 21 November 2007 (MST)
:: I beg to differ - it's not the "scenarios" which have requirement for output, it's the spirit of the task itself which is not correctly presented if you allow constants (or empty programs) as solutions. I strongly recommend to read at least the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29 Wikipedia article], or the book mentioned above (your library should have a copy). The philosopher Quine studied '''self-reference''', as exemplified in the paradox "'Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation' yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation."
:: And it's this idea that makes up a Quine - A piece of code, applied to itself, once quoted and once unquoted. (BTW, this then again is the same technique used to prove undecidability theorems.) And the extra requirement "should '''print''' it's output" is one way to enforce that the quoting has to be done by the program itself, not by some external read-eval-print loop.
:: The task is bad enough as it is (it doesn't really help in comparing programming languages), and it's not improved by allowing "fortunate" border cases which take away the main point. Ok, so what's the procedure to resolve differences in opinion? [[User:Dirkt|Dirkt]] 14:16, 21 November 2007 (MST)
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