Re: PHPNuke license

[Nathan E Norman <nnorman@incanus.net>]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 07:33:51AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 10:52:57PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > > That sounds ludicrous and farfetched to me, given that both statements, by
> > > themselves, are already farfetched in this circumstance.
> > 
> > Well, it certainly seems plausible that at least some programs can do
> > this.  Consider a quine attached to a network socket.
> 
> OK, I'll bite -- what's a quine?

$ dict quine
3 definitions found

 [ ... ]

>From Jargon File (4.3.0, 30 APR 2001) [jargon]:

  quine /kwi:n/ n. [from the name of the logician Willard van Orman
     Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter] A program that generates a copy of its
     own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible
     quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement.
     (We ignore some variants of BASIC in which a program consisting of a
     single empty string literal reproduces itself trivially.) Here is one
     classic quine:

    ((lambda (x)
      (list x (list (quote quote) x)))
     (quote
        (lambda (x)
          (list x (list (quote quote) x)))))

     This one works in LISP or Scheme. It's relatively easy to write quines
     in other languages such as Postscript which readily handle programs as
     data; much harder (and thus more challenging!) in languages like C which
     do not. Here is a classic C quine for ASCII machines:

    char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main()
    {printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c";
    main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}

     For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the interior line breaks.
     Here is another elegant quine in ANSI C:

    #define q(k)main(){return!puts(#k"\nq("#k")");}
    q(#define q(k)main(){return!puts(#k"\nq("#k")");})

     Some infamous {Obfuscated C Contest} entries have been quines that
     reproduced in exotic ways. There is an amusing Quine Home Page
     (http://www.nyx.org/~gthompso/quine.htm).

-- 
Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net
  Whenever men attempt to suppress argument and free speech, we may
  be sure that they know their cause to be a bad one.
          -- R. G. Horton