Zip Files All The Way Down

Emailing that zip file would probably break most mail based virus checkers. I doubt the people who wrote them anticipated an infinite zip file. Too large, sure, but infinite? Probably not.

This brings back memories of trying to crash BBS uploaded file verifiers by sending massively compressed files that would crash the board when unzipped. Ahhh the memories..

Quines are easy in Python. A 0-byte python source file outputs itself when run. :)

My favorite quine is in Factor:<p><pre><code> [ [ dup curry ] dup curry ] </code></pre> (Credit to Slava Pestov)<p>When called, it puts [ dup curry ] on the stack, then creates a copy of it on the stack. curry then takes the second block from the stack and prepends it to the first. Rather than being a program that evaluates to its code, it's a code block that evaluates to itself (similar to most Scheme/Lisp quines).<p>(Off topic note: I originally read the title of the article as "Zip Flies All The Way Down" and was wondering what zipping my fly down had to do with hacker news.)

Note the relevance to HN and the y-combinator, since this represents a fixed point for the zip function.

When I'm writing programs for myself, sometimes I make the perl program write itself out as the config file with a config hash as the __data__. When the program runs, it tests if the config file doesn't exist or is an older version of the program. I don't know if it has any real use, but it's fun to write :D

This is really bad on Safari, which attempts to unzip archives automatically. Whatever you do don't download the zip if you have it set to unarchive automatically.