Show HN: Quinesnake – A quine that plays snake over its own source
github.comThis is spectacular!
You had me at
./quinesnake.cpp
So it’s not just a quine, but a polyglot quine even. They are the best :)
A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. The standard terms for these programs in the computability theory and computer science literature are "self-replicating programs", "self-reproducing programs", and "self-copying programs".
So it's a self-replicating game of snake? Sounds very much like a worm virus. Very nice project though!
Not exactly. It prints exactly it's own source code as output but it doesn't run it again. You can run a quine output manually as it's by definition the same code that printed it but it lacks the ability to keep executing continuously like a worm virus would require. I guess you could make a worm virus that's also a quine but that would be a whole other problem.
This is really neat! Unfortunately the color isn't working for me for some reason, which makes locating the initial food quite difficult. Any idea what could cause that?
Oh that sucks, the whole point of programs like these is that they should still be portable. Could you make a GitHub issue (or email me) with your platform, shell, compiler version and curses version?
Sure thing!
Are there resources for making a quine that improve the development process or is it exactly as insanely tedious as it looks? Because this looks pretty impressive.
Unfortunately it's a pretty manual, tedious and frustrating process, especially when the code is minified and you want to squeeze it into as small a source file as possible.
Gratifying to read the author say that creating something as mind-boggling this was tedious and frustrating.
It's great, by the way :)
A generic (pseudo) quine is:
So if you wanna do extra stuff on top of being a quine, just write that program and bootstrap with escape()s = "print escape(s)\n{payload}" print "s = " print escape(s) {payload}We don’t do this, that and the other thing because they are easy, we do it because they are hard.
The tedium is part of the difficulty. Making it easier is not inspirational. Although buildings the tooling to do so would itself be quite the challenge ...
Thanks for the reference.
Very cool
A quine produces a copy of its own source, but quinine is the stuff they put in tonic water.