Quines: Self-Reproducing Programs

This is a repository containing different implementations of self-reproducing programs. It is not meant to be a showcase of various languages, but rather a showcase of different implementations/styles in the languages I primarily use.

What is a quine?

Ken Thomposon describes a quine in his paper Reflections on Trusting Trust as, "More precisely stated, the problem is to write a source program that, when compiled and executed, will produce as output an exact copy of its source."

Why?

All it does it output it's source? What could be any use of that? The description given by Ken does not limit the quine to what it can do in the time between starting and outputting its own source. An example of what I mean is the self-compiling quines, which compile themselves before outputting their source code. It is my intention to explore the depths of quines and what they are truly capable of.

Notable Existing Quines

• quinesnake - a holy grail of quines, this is the game of snake played over its own source code
• quinedb - a quine-based database in BASH
• LDCA - self-replicating, self-modifying Assemply program
• QuineWars - an HTML file, that prints itself out in the Star Wars opening style

TODO

• Implement a basic quine

  • C
  • Go
  • Python 3
  • C++
  • BASH
  • JavaScript

• Implement a hello world quine

  • C
  • Go
  • C++
  • BASH
  • JavaScript

• Implement a self-compiling quine

  • C
  • Go
  • C++

• Implement a self-modifying quine

  • C
  • Go
  • C++

• Implement a frankenquine

  • traditional
  • pseudo