Silly programming problems

Blair P. Houghton bph at buengc.BU.EDU
Wed Mar 22 04:41:23 AEST 1989


In article <2179 at fireball.cs.vu.nl> maart at cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes:
>frisk at rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) writes:
>\	   "write a one line C program that produces the source code
>\	   to itself when run."
[...]

"the source code to itself"  -- that's what it sez.

>A cheat.
>----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------
>main(){execlp("cat","",__FILE__,(char*)0);}
>----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------

Not so big a cheat.  It seems it really would produce it's own source,
rather than just a copy or whatever its buggy little self happens to
contain.  This way, you are _certain_ that the program is what its
source looks like.  Except now you have to keep them together
forever...but it may be the only answer that fits the spec perfectly.

				--Blair
				  "Maybe there should be some
				   'find' and 'diff' action in
				   there, just to be sure..."



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