Yet Another Quine In Haskell

A few years ago I was asked by a student if I heard about a task to write a program that outputs its own source code. Back then I didn’t know about it and sort of ignored that question, but later a friend of mine told me that such a program is called a quine and that he had already solved that in couple of languages. Today I used my beginner’s knowledge of Haskell to write my first quine. If you haven’t written any quine by yourself yet then it may be better that you don’t read this post - knowing the solution will spoil the fun.

I started of with the general idea of defining a string that will contain the text of the program and displaying that string. This is a strange kind of recursion that I haven’t met before. The idea itself seems rather simple, but it took me about 40 minutes of hacking to get it right. I spent much of that time struggling to get the quote signs display correctly. Anyway, here it is:

module Main where --"
main = do putStr (quine ++ "\\nquine = \\"" ++ take 20 quine ++ "\\\\")
          print (drop 21 quine)
quine = "module Main where --\\"\\nmain = do putStr (quine ++ \\"\\\\nquine = \\\\\\"\\" ++ take 20 quine ++ \\"\\\\\\\\\\")\\n          print (drop 21 quine)"

This requires that there is a new line at the and of source file. It’s rather crappy but I’m still happy with it. I googled around for some other quines in Haskell and, as expected, found more elegant solutions:

(\\a -> a ++ show a) "(\\\\a -> a ++ show a) "

As Shin-Cheng Mu notices this is based on the resemblance to lambda expression (\x -> x x) (\x -> x x), which reduces to itself. It also resembles the Y-combinator (on which I hope to write soon). There is also a shorter version of the above.

ap (++) show "ap (++) show "

It uses the ap function operating on a monad and frankly speaking I don’t understand it. The two above solutions are not stand-alone programs and work only in ghci, as opposed to my solution. It is not difficult however to adapt the idea to a stand-alone application:

main = putStr (quine q)
quine s = s ++ show s
q = "main = putStr (quine q)\\nquine s = s ++ show s\\nq = "

The solution is by Jon Fairbairn and I found it here. The same using a monad (found here):

main = (putStr . ap (++) show) "main = (putStr . ap (++) show) "

Only this will not compile since ap is not in scope and would have to be imported. I don’t know if this should count as a valid solution.

To me the conclusion is that I’m still thinking in an imperative style. Quine solutions seem to be a lot easier in languages supporting higher order functions, yet I solved it in a way typical to languages like Java or C.

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