Re: Writing own source disk

On 03/06/2024 10:31, Ben Bacarisse wrote:

bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:
 

On 02/06/2024 23:17, Ben Bacarisse wrote:

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

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

A quine must also not process any input.

>
No input at compile-time or runtime?

 The program isn't running at compile time.
 

A compiler necessarily has to have the source code of the program as input,
so what are the limitations?

 The compiler can do what it likes!
 

A C program can use #include; does that extend
to directives like #embed, or is that considered cheating?

 There's nothing wrong with using either, but a C quine that uses #embed
relies on knowing the name of the file in which it is stored.

I assume you can use __FILE__ with #embed? (I can do that with my version of it).
Then it doesn't need to know the actual name of the file.

 It is a
"fixed point of the execution environment", but it's probably the least
interesting C quine possible -- much like
    1
 is a quine in languages that evaluate and print an expression.

Not really. I've just added this line:
   puts(strinclude(__FILE__));
to the main function of a program called sql.c (combines sqlite3.c and shell.c). When I run it (after building with my 'bcc' compiler), it first prints 235,577 lines of its source code.
(By making this optional, it has some real use-cases.)