New Tag Proposal: Self-Referential

Question

There's a lot of questions that result in code that refers to itself. Typically these questions get assigned the quine tag, though it's not quite applicable in some cases.

I propose a new tag self-referential, which is applied to questions where the answers in someway refer to their characteristics, such as length or characters. While there's some overlap with quine, I believe this can be reconciled by having quine refer to challenges that have to output or generates versions of themselves, such as permutations, sections, or backwards.

Some questions that would benefit from adding the self-referential tag (and maybe removing the quine tag):

• Output your score!

• Output with the same length as the code

  • Create output twice the length of the code and other variants

• Print every character your program doesn't have

• What is the smallest positive base 10 integer that can be printed by a program shorter (in characters) than itself?

Something like the self-identifying quine or print every character you program doesn't have might get both tags.

Answer 1

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self-referential would be strictly weaker than quine. quine should only be used for tasks involving the actual manipulation of the program's source, which is not required for the challenges linked.

While "Output with the same length as the code" could theoretically be done by using a standard extensible quine to get the source, computing the length of the source and using that to generate a string, it is unlikely that would be competitive. Because it is not the only viable approach to solving the challenge, self-referential is more appropriate.

This distinction seems useful to make.