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From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Silly programming problems
Message-ID: <2358@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 21 Mar 89 18:41:23 GMT
References: <817@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <2179@fireball.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.misc
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 23

In article <2179@fireball.cs.vu.nl> maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes:
>frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) writes:
>\	   "write a one line C program that produces the source code
>\	   to itself when run."
[...]

"the source code to itself"  -- that's what it sez.

>A cheat.
>----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------
>main(){execlp("cat","",__FILE__,(char*)0);}
>----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------

Not so big a cheat.  It seems it really would produce it's own source,
rather than just a copy or whatever its buggy little self happens to
contain.  This way, you are _certain_ that the program is what its
source looks like.  Except now you have to keep them together
forever...but it may be the only answer that fits the spec perfectly.

				--Blair
				  "Maybe there should be some
				   'find' and 'diff' action in
				   there, just to be sure..."