Question

Ken Thompson includes an example C program that does this action before talking about compilers in his Turing Award paper “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. (15[1])One joke programming language (15[1])is named for its four single-character commands, which print “hello world”, print the “99 bottles of beer” lyrics, increment the accumulator, and do this action. Japanese developer Yusuke Endoh, who goes by the handle “mame”, made a “radiation hardened” program performing this action, which somehow still works if any character is deleted. A program that supposedly performs this action won the “Worst Abuse of the Rules” in the Obfuscated C Code Contest, (15[1])and was an (*) empty file. (10[1])The name for programs that do this action was invented by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach when discussing the statement “yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation”. For 10 points, name this action performed by quines. ■END■

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