[spam][crazy][fiction][random] Non-Canon MCBoss Spinoffs
Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many
gmkarl at gmail.com
Sat Oct 14 08:37:33 PDT 2023
GPT-4
User
Write some codegolf for a buggy quine that produces a program that
differs from the original one.
ChatGPT
Code golf is about writing the shortest code possible to achieve a
specific output. A quine is a non-empty computer program which takes
no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only
output. So, a "buggy" quine will output a program slightly different
from itself.
In Python, a simple and relatively short true quine might look like this:
```python
a='a=%r;print(a%%a)';print(a%a)
```
But, we want a "buggy" quine. Let's modify it slightly so that it
outputs a valid Python program that is different from the original
source code:
```python
a='b=%r;print(a%%a)';print(a%a)
```
Explanation:
1. The above code defines a string `a` that contains a format string
with a placeholder for a string (`%r`).
2. It then prints the string `a`, formatted with `a` itself as the
replacement for `%r`.
Output:
```python
b='b=%r;print(a%%a)';print(a%a)
```
It's different from the original code (using `b` instead of `a` and
having a mismatch in referenced variable name), but it's still a
syntactically valid Python program.
Note: It is not a true quine because it doesn’t produce its own source
code when run. But it’s an interesting and short piece of code that
comes close, and complies with the request for a “buggy” quine.
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