quine
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: simple
Topics: computing
engineering
human-sciences
mathematics
natural-sciences
philosophy
physical-sciences
sciences
Etymology: From Quine, named after the American logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000).
Verb etymology 1, verb sense 1 (“to append (a text) to a quotation of itself”) was coined by the American cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter (born 1945) in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979; see the quotation), referring to Quine’s study of indirect self-reference and in particular Quine’s paradox, the following statement that produces a paradox: “‘Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation’ yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.” Hofstadter also referred to the concept of noun etymology 1, noun sense 1 (“program that produces its own source code as output”) in the book, but termed it a self-rep rather than a quine.
Verb etymology 1, verb sense 2 (“to deny the importance or significance of (something obviously real or important)”) was independently coined by the American cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) in September 1969 in the original version of his work The Philosophical Lexicon: see the 1987 quotation.
Inflected forms:
form: quines
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: quines
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: quining
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: quined
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: quined
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: A program that produces its own source code as output.
pos: noun
examples: This has been bugging me recently. Any quines or pointers to relevant articles or web pages is appreciated. Thanks!
Self-reproducing programs are commonly called quines. Do a web search, it should turn up lots of them. There was also a quine thread here in comp.lang.c just days ago, search deja.com (the thread's title was something about self-printing programs, I think).
A quine is a program that can print its own source code. Most quines are notoriously difficult (and fiendish) to write. Perl can cheat, though. :)
Why have a one-page chapter that doesn't say anything? At the least, you should present a quine program written in pure ISO C (I can send you one if you like); […] you might refer the interested reader to Ken Thompson's ACM lecture or to another good source of quine-related puzzles. Quines *are* a lot of fun, but why waste time with trivial ASCII-based examples when there are much more fundamental ways to create them?
A respectable quine—one that doesn't cheat—is not allowed to do anything as underhand or trivial as seeking the source file on the disk, opening it, and copying (or printing) its contents. Although writing a quine is not always easy, and in fact may seem impossible, it can always be done in any programming language that is Turing complete (see Turing machine), which includes every programming language actually in use.
SelfGOL can reproduce itself; it can turn other programs into a quine; it can display a scrolling banner; it plays the Game of Life; and it contains no (ordinary) loops, goto statements, or if statements. Control flow is done, well, interestingly.
Yet from a different perspective, it [the semantics of a program] describes the process of producing this very code; in other words, it is because object- and meta-language interrelate that makes a quine difficult; in less reflective programs, where means and ends are more separate, this difficulty is not so obvious.
Gee, last time I wrote a quine in Lisp it ended up being kind of difficult …
The solution is to make a quine that is also a λ-expression (instead of a list of statements). This is possible, thanks to S-expressions. The way the quine works relies on the fact that its code is a list of statements and that the last one can take a list of the previous ones as arguments.
A Quine is a program that prints its own code. Quines exist for any programming language that is Turing complete and it is a common challenge for students to come up with a Quine in their language of choice. The Quine Page provides a comprehensive list of such programs in various languages.
Upon receiving a "QUINE" request by the client, the server will first send a 01 OK response, and will then provide the client with a quine in the programming language used to implement the server. This quine does not have to be original.
gloss: To append (a text) to a quotation of itself.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Anyway, now I know how to quine a phrase. It's quite amusing. Here's a quined phrase: / "IS A SENTENCE FRAGMENT" IS A SENTENCE FRAGMENT. / It's silly but all the same I enjoy it. You take a sentence fragment, quine it, and lo and behold, you've made a sentence! A true sentence, in this case.
"Quining" is what I called it in my book. (He certainly didn't call it that!) Quining is an operation that I define on any string of English. […] Here is an example of a quined phrase: "is a sentence with no subject" is a sentence with no subject.
Diamond arises in Gödelian meta-mathematics. In meta-math, sentences can refer to each other’s provability, and to quining. This yields self-reference: T = “‘is provable when quined’ is provable when quined.” / D = “‘is unprovable when quined’ is unprovable when quined.” […]
In "Love And Theft", [Bob] Dylan quined the love and theft in his songs in the album's title, "Love And Theft". So the subtext, the meaning of the entire album, when preceded by its quotation, its symbol, yields a paradox.
gloss: To deny the existence or significance of (something obviously real or important).
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: quine. v. (1) To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant. "Some philosophers have quined classes, and some have even quined physical objects." Occasionally used intr[ansitively], e.g., "You think I quine, sir. I assure you I do not!"
As with the puzzle of what happens during the combustion of a metal in pure oxygen (the "steel wool" experiment), this result can of course be quined. Taking the phlogistic view, we could say that the calx requires the same phlogiston content as the metal, so of course the amount of water absorbed must be in accord with that.
They [some philosophers] deny that mental states and events actually possess the qualitative properties attributed to them by qualia friends and, as a consequence, they advocate quining qualia.
Qualia are quined not because [Daniel] Dennett imagines that there is nothing it is like to be conscious, but because no clear demarcation can be drawn between representations of qualitative properties and representations of other sorts of states.
One of the things that [Ludwig] Wittgenstein is most famous for is quining 'private language'. By saying that private languages can't exist Wittgenstein wanted us to recognize the inescapable function of the social fabric in language's work.
One might object that in this section I’ve not exactly quined Cartesian qualia, since my denial of the reality of phenomenal colour comes at the cost of accepting the "qualitative character" of sensory experience, with which contemporary philosophers, in fact, often identify qualia.
Derived words: quiner
quined
quining
Translations: