biographical name Willard Van Orman 1908-2000 American philosopher
/kwi:n/ (After the logician Willard V. Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter) A program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement. Some infamous Obfuscated C Contest entries have been quines that reproduced in exotic ways. Ken Thompson's back door involved an interesting variant of a quine - a compiler which reproduced part of itself when compiling (a version of) itself.