I shows a self-reproducing program in the C programming language. This program can be easily written by another program. This pro- gram can contain an arbitrary amount of excess baggage that will be reproduced along with the main algorithm. In the example, even the comment is reproduced. In this ease, I will use a specific example from the C compiler.
C allows a string construct to specify an initialized character array.
The individual characters in the string ean be escaped to represent unprintable characters. Figure 2 is an idealization of the code in the C compiler that interprets the character escape sequence. This is an amazing piece of code. The act of knowing then allows it to recompile itself, thus perpetuating the knowledge. The extension to Figure 2 is obvious and is presented in Figure 3.