p = "p = %c%s%c
printf p,34,p,34"
printf p,34,p,34

def p(x)
  puts "x=<<'HERE'\n"+x+"HERE\n"
  puts "puts x"
  puts "p(x)"
end
x=<<'HERE'
def p(x)
  puts "x=<<'HERE'\n"+x+"HERE\n"
  puts "puts x"
  puts "p(x)"
end
HERE
puts x
p(x)

http://peitor.blogspot.com/2006/04/quine-in-csharp-c_28.html

but there are other good ones around

google for: quine c# main

s=’s=%c%s%c; printf s,39,s,39′; printf s,39,s,39

Interestingly, it’s identical to the perl solution, except the variable ‘s’ doesn’t need a ‘$’ prefix. (Ruby borrowed a fair bit from perl and a little from the C standard library).

I’ve recently become interested in the concept of the ‘perfect’ programming language. Along these lines, Slashdot had a very provocative article reviewing the book Java.Beyond Java.

This book mentions four programming languages that are the best candidates for replacing Java: Ruby, Python, Groovy, and .NET. Secondary contenders are perl (too messy), Smalltalk (wasn’t java), PHP (too close to HTML), and LISP (not accessible). The author really liks Ruby as the first choice, but didn’t like the fact that Ruby doesn’t have a good Java VM implementation. His second favorite was Python.

Another thing that piqued my interest in Ruby was that the Pragmatic Programmers have written a book on ruby. I went out and bought this book and have been busy reading it ever since. It really does look a lot better than many languages, but I still can’t call it the ‘perfect’ language. Even so, it seems like a step in the right direction.

I’ll have to try some Python next, though. JavaScript may have to wait a while. There’s also another language named ‘D’ that might have some promise…

$s = ‘$s = %c%s%c; printf $s, 39, $s, 39;’; printf $s, 39, $s, 39;

void main(void) { char *s=”void main(void) { char *x=%c%s%c; printf(s, 34, s, 34); }”; printf(s, 34, s, 34); }

(This is a C program that prints out it’s source code)
On some systems, it will compile with warnings because ‘printf’ is not defined before use, and the ‘main’ function does not return type ‘int’. Even so, it will compile with gcc.

I’ll skip the JavaScript version for now, but I might put up one for Ruby. Stay tuned…