23. December 2022 ABAP Quine

What the heck is a quine, you might ask?

Wikipedia says:

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“.

If you have watched the Art Of Code talk by Dylan Beattie, you might remember the section about Quines. If not, I highly recommend to watch it. It’s very interesting.

ABAP Quine

But is it possible to generate a Quine in ABAP? In the YAABB forum, we tried…

This is a Quine in ABAP. It prints it own source code. However this might work…

You can see all Quines and variants of it in my github repository.

The source codes are quite some years old now. Maybe there are better or more beautiful way to create an ABAP Quine with the new features we have meanwhile? Let me know!

The 128-Language Quine Relay

The most impressive Quine might be the The 128-Language Quine Relay.

Yusuke Endoh has created an astonishing 128 language Ouroborous quine. This Ruby program produces a Rust program, which produces a Scala program, which produces a Scheme program, and so on, progressing through another 124 languages to return to its original state. To understand what this is and how it came to be, we first need to consider the quine.

Have fun

Enno Wulff