![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Taken from here:
A string of letters that reads the same backwards as forwards is a palindrome ('Madam, I'm Adam'; 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!'; 'Was it a car or a cat I saw?'). A semordnilap is closely related, but the reversed text must be different. For example, if you reverse 'diaper' you get 'repaid', and if you invert 'desserts' the word 'stressed' appears. A more complicated example is 'deliver no evil', but you can probably invent better ones for yourself.
That's pretty cute, I thought. But then...
As semordnilap is palindromes written backwards, it's a self-referential word, one that encapsulates within itself the thing it represents.
Okay, I thought, very cute. But at the same time it was triggering a vague recognition, an almost tactile association with some other set of websites. Then it hit me. 'Semordnilap' is a quine. I was being reminded of the look and feel of researching quines and similar programming language oddities several years ago.
A quine implemented in the English language. Dear god, that's beautiful. (And my subconcious is obviously far smarter than I am.)
A string of letters that reads the same backwards as forwards is a palindrome ('Madam, I'm Adam'; 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!'; 'Was it a car or a cat I saw?'). A semordnilap is closely related, but the reversed text must be different. For example, if you reverse 'diaper' you get 'repaid', and if you invert 'desserts' the word 'stressed' appears. A more complicated example is 'deliver no evil', but you can probably invent better ones for yourself.
That's pretty cute, I thought. But then...
As semordnilap is palindromes written backwards, it's a self-referential word, one that encapsulates within itself the thing it represents.
Okay, I thought, very cute. But at the same time it was triggering a vague recognition, an almost tactile association with some other set of websites. Then it hit me. 'Semordnilap' is a quine. I was being reminded of the look and feel of researching quines and similar programming language oddities several years ago.
A quine implemented in the English language. Dear god, that's beautiful. (And my subconcious is obviously far smarter than I am.)