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This definitely feels like cheating. There's so much one could do rather than just use the ` operator to quote the program. Given a program f, one can create a program g which prints out g and then does f, and one does not require any special operators to do this. There's some cool computability stuff in this area, and I don't know (off the top of my head) of a readable introduction.

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Your observation is a consequence of Kleene's recursion theorem, which I summarised briefly in http://vimeo.com/66863570#at=13m40s (extracted from chapter 8 of http://computationbook.com/).

I agree. Using quote is basically using the Lisp parser to do the work and is almost like reading the source program as input. It would have been interesting if their program contained a parser (which I think wouldn't be too distracting because of homoiconicity).

I found this an interesting read anyways especially when they start parametrizing the quine by a function F near the end. Although my interest shouldn't be that much of a surprise given my username:

asrp: a self-referential person/program/place

Doug H, is that you?

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