markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) (03/02/88)
In a prior article, I wrote the description of a project to make a program to
reproduce itself in Pascal. I suggested that the program should replicate
itself into a file with a different name than the original program file's.
Further it should be done in such a way that the offspring of successive
generations are placed into files of distinct names, solely by the programs'
actions.
This is a continuation on the original project.
Once you've succeeded in creating a self-reproducing program in Pascal,
you'll begin to see a general method for making any program self-reproducing.
You are then ready to pursue the following project:
Write a program whose input is a file containing a Pascal program
and whose output is a copy of the original program with a self-
replicator added to it. Thus the output file contains a copy of the
input program file, except that it can reproduce itself.
This program is a universal replicator. Test the program by running it
on itself. Test it by running it on a Pascal compiler written in Pascal.