The discovery of how to do it is a revelation that far surpasses any benefit obtained by being told how to do it. I shows a self-reproducing program in the C programming language. This program 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 can be escaped to represent unprintable characters. 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 . We then recompile the C compiler, but we get a diagnostic.