The Curious Case of Quines 🤔
In 1994, Szymon Rusinkiewicz submitted his entry to the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC). In the documentation for his code, he wrote –
The world's smallest self-replicating program. Guaranteed. Produces a listing of itself on stdout.
What made Szymon’s claim interesting?
The C file submitted by him was blank. Szymon’s hack was based on a quirk of a specific C compiler that compiled an empty file into a program that does nothing. So an empty C program when compiled and run gave an empty output, i.e. its own source code which is blank.
He was right in his claim. A self-replicating program, it was.