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Depends on how you define "works." The program continues to output the original source code after the deletion, and ceases to be a quine. Still a very cool trick though :)
Hard mode: flip bits in the interpreter's process memory as it's running.
$ git clone the_quine
$ cd the_quine
$ ruby the_quine
The program 'ruby' can be found in the following packages:
* ruby1.8
* ruby1.9.1
# shit I don't have ruby
$ sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1
# 200 bytes/s, terrible
# ... what's going on? Ah finally.
$ touch output
$ ruby rbquine.rb > output
$ diff rbquine.rb output
# nowtEarlier quoted context omitted.
Since we're being technical, Japanese does not have any alphabet as such; an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. Japanese uses syllabaries ('kana' in Japanese), where almost all characters represent more than 1 sound. Hiragana is typically used to write Japanese words and grammatical particles, while katakana is typically used to write foreign words and for spe…
> an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. Do any languages have an alphabet according to this definition?
Depends on how you define "works." The program continues to output the original source code after the deletion, and ceases to be a quine. Still a very cool trick though :)
But reverting to the original source gives the program a stability property that will maintain functionality through multiple generations. Outputting the modified source would cause the program to accrue errors over time, meaning eventually entropy would win.
Fascinating exercise. "Deleting one character" seems a phenomenally unlikely outcome of radiation, though.
Interesting! Does anyone know of a language or operating system that uses Reed–Solomon error correction on every file? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed–Solomon_error_correction Or to top that, imagine a computer where the entire memory space, perhaps shared with persistent flash memory, was encoded in this manner, so that even the filesystem was protected against bit flips. When I was doing Mac repair a few years b…
A while back, after losing some personal photographs to bit rot, I became curious about this and did some experimentation with RS. The biggest drawback I found was that even with a relatively fast processor it is slow compared to typical disk read/write speeds. I concluded that the ZFS approach of RAID + checksums would be preferable.
Here are the results up to 23 removals: http://i.imgur.com/PwWN7Z7.png
This reminds me of a work I did as an undergrad which landed in a paper called "Can a Program Reverse-Engineer Itself?". The idea is to take any program/function and make it a quine so you can retrieve its original code even if it has been obfuscated. You can find the paper here: http://pablo.rauzy.name/research.html#imacc11.
