quine
/kwaɪn/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.36 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A program that produces its own source code as output.
Example Sentences
- "This has been bugging me recently. Any quines or pointers to relevant articles or web pages is appreciated. Thanks!"
- "Self-reproducing programs are commonly called quines. Do a web search, it should turn up lots of them. There was also a quine thread here in comp.lang.c just days ago, search deja.com (the thread's title was something about self-printing programs, I think)."
- "A quine is a program that can print its own source code. Most quines are notoriously difficult (and fiendish) to write. Perl can cheat, though. :)"
- "Why have a one-page chapter that doesn't say anything? At the least, you should present a quine program written in pure ISO C (I can send you one if you like); […] you might refer the interested reader to Ken Thompson's ACM lecture or to another good source of quine-related puzzles. Quines *are* a lot of fun, but why waste time with trivial ASCII-based examples when there are much more fundamental ways to create them?"
- "A respectable quine—one that doesn't cheat—is not allowed to do anything as underhand or trivial as seeking the source file on the disk, opening it, and copying (or printing) its contents. Although writing a quine is not always easy, and in fact may seem impossible, it can always be done in any programming language that is Turing complete (see Turing machine), which includes every programming language actually in use."
- "SelfGOL can reproduce itself; it can turn other programs into a quine; it can display a scrolling banner; it plays the Game of Life; and it contains no (ordinary) loops, goto statements, or if statements. Control flow is done, well, interestingly."
Etymology
From Quine, named after the American logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000). Verb etymology 1, verb sense 1 (“to append (a text) to a quotation of itself”) was coined by the American cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter (born 1945) in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979; see the quotation), referring to Quine’s study of indirect self-reference and in particular Quine’s paradox, the following statement that produces a paradox: “‘Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation’ yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.” Hofstadter also referred to the concept of noun etymology 1, noun sense 1 (“program that produces its own source code as output”) in the book, but termed it a self-rep rather than a quine. Verb etymology 1, verb sense 2 (“to deny the importance or significance of (something obviously real or important)”) was independently coined by the American cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) in September 1969 in the original version of his work The Philosophical Lexicon: see the 1987 quotation.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *pénkʷe, Quine
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /kwaɪn/
- British English: /kwaɪn/