I had this idea for a year ago or so, I forgot all about it, and I just rembered it again a minute ago.
Is it possible to construct a quine (a program whose output is its source code) in ordinary English language? That is, to say something to someone and get what you just said as a response.
The English language can transfer some of the commands that programming languages can, like conditionals, loops and arithmetic (and some it can't, like memory allocation and pointers). Are those commands enough to make a quine out of?
Also, the sentence "Say this sentence" isn't a quine, because the response you'd get is "This sentence".
"Please repeat this sentence that I am just speaking, to me, beginning from the word 'please'."
Sure: "This sentence that I am just speaking, to me, beginning from the word 'please'."
What I'm looking for is an fool-proof quine, that could be used on someone with the intelligence and naïveté of a computer. And I don't know if that's possible.
Nice try, though.
"Please repeat this sentence that I am just speaking, to me, beginning from the word 'please'."
Sure: "This sentence that I am just speaking, to me, beginning from the word 'please'."
What I'm looking for is an fool-proof quine
What part of "beginning from the word 'please'" was unclear?
If you're aiming to utilize someone who does not understand even the basics of the language they're communicating in, you have no hope of trying to issue complicated programming in that language.
EDIT: If you're that pedantic and you assume that words such as "repeat" and "say" take the rest of the text as a literal, bypassing all language parsing, you just need to formulate it slightly differently -- put the details first and the command last:
"Beginning from the first occurrence of the word 'beginning', please repeat to me this entire sentence."
Or:
"Beginning from the first occurrence of the word 'beginning', regarding this entire sentence, please repeat it."
A valid answer, but I doubt "someone with the intelligence and naïveté of a computer" – the intended recipient of the question, according to Swedishmartin – would respond like that. I think they would parse "What am I saying?" as a request for what I am saying, and what I am saying is "What am I saying?"
Also, "Metal Gear?"
Actually, the original Quine was not a program at all, but a paradoxical statement in English, by a philosopher (coincidentally, named Willard Quine) who studied indirect self-reference extensively.
The statement: “Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
I'm not sure exactly how computer scientists got the idea of writing a program that displays its own source code from that statement, but it makes intuitive sense to me that they did.
Edit:
I realize that this is not what swedishmartin was looking for, so to answer his request, I submit:
"Quote this."
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
"Please repeat what I'm saying starting at the end of my sentence and using reverse word order: order word reverse using and sentence my of end the at starting saying I'm what repeat Please."
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
