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What does "A" mean?
Consider a program that prints its own code.
You might think it would be easy to use a print statement, but it is not so because you also have to combine the output of whitespace,
For example, in C language, the following is the shortest one known so far.
#include
char *s="#include %c
char *s=%c%s%c;main(){printf(s,10,34,s,34);
return 0;}";main(){printf(s,10,34,s,34);return 0;}
In LISP, it is much easier to write the following. This program is represented in a tree structure as A in IBA Logo.
((lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x))) '(lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x))))
A LISP program is able to evaluate itself, which is why we can write such short self-reproducing programs.
As a yong AI researcher, I learned the LISP language and believed that the ideas can be very useful for AI (Artificial Intelligence) and AL (Artificial Life).