On Sun, 13 Feb 2011, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

Is #4 below a quine?

All of them are based on the same principle of a patch taking its own screenshot, and showing it through a [#see] object. The difference is in whether you can see the whole patching distinctly or not, as some are more downscaled than others, and some have missing pieces (that have gone out of the frame), and those missing pieces are sometimes pieces of the patching.

But before calling it a quine, you have to ask yourself what's the input, what's the output, how to make the output correspond to the input (especially : in which format), and whether a quine is allowed to use self-reference tools (self-screenshot, self-[textfile], canvas queries) instead of being forced to use other means, such as the usual "Y-Combinator" :

main() {char *s="main() {char *s=%c%s%c; printf(s,34,s,34);}"; printf(s,34,s,34);}

(this example is in C language)

| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC