Re: Writing own source disk

On 04/06/2024 14:33, Ben Bacarisse wrote:

Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> writes:
 

On 03/06/2024 14:47, Ben Bacarisse wrote:

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:
>

On Sun, 2 Jun 2024 12:54:17 +0100
Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Writing a prgram which writes its own source to standard output is a
standard programming problem. It's called a quine.

>
Is it named after Willard Van Orman Quine?

In honour of rather than after since "after" is usually used for
discoverers.  It was Douglas Hofstadter who coined the term.
>

>
/* source for a quine */

 There seems to be loads missing.  How big it the program when it's all
there or, since it's a quine, what is the size of text it outputs?
 

Yes. Tht's the heart of it.
I'll start a quine project. But I need to get the babyxfs_shell to a rather more developed state first to really give bbx_filesystem a good test and stabilise it.
The power of BabyXFS quines is that you can just package an arbitrary program as a quine. Because babyxfs_dirtoxml will simply package up any source directory for passing to bbx_filesystem_quine.
So the idea is that when you have BabyXFS incorporated, it is trivially easy to make your program into a quine, and, for open source, that is exactly what you need.
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