Node:

[quine]

, Next:

[quote chapter and verse]

, Previous:

[quick-and-dirty]

, Up:

[= Q =]

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: