Stars: Quine Relay

There are many repos on GitHub which are only there for entertainment: serious projects in esoteric languages, overly-complicated code, simple jokes, and even political satire in the form of software. Frankly, I’m sometimes amazed how much time and effort people are willing to invest in something like this. But, then again, I myself have invested a lot of time being entertained by such projects. It’s art.

Review

So, a quine is a program which outputs its own source code. This is easy in the HQ9+, but not that easy in others. It’s actually a fun exercise to try to do it.

Uroboros¹, or ouroboros², or uroborus³ (not sure there’s a consensus on how this is spelled) is the fitting name for a program which outputs the source code of another program, which output the source of another… and so on, until the circle is closed by the last program outputting the source code of the first.

Quine Relay is an uroboros with 128 steps in 128 different languages. Er… well, I’m out of words, so I’ll end on this.

This post is part of my Project Stars where I post a short review for each of the 500+ repos that I’ve starred on GitHub.
For more posts of this series see the tag stars in this blog.