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Devac  ·  2471 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A self-replicating, mutating, program

    looks like it iteratively renames the file a variant of ACfileGT (the nucleotides), where the capital letters change

This line? No, it just generates all possible 3-element combinations with repetitions from a set "ACGT". There's no file handling as of yet.

    What I had in mind was a quine in which the actual commanding (the guts of it) randomly, iteratively changed inside of the program, but it would almost always still mutate in a way that was replicable.

That's still doable, I think. Just far less likely to produce an actual line of succession. I think that I can do sort of a compromise between my lazy solution and yours "this might have to reinvent compilers" formulation: what about having a procedurally changed block or mutation parameters like 'add a nested conditional determining a future mutation type' or 'remove this loop that does something the nucleotide chain'? That only needs to comply with Python's syntax but you can add pretty much anything.

Anyway, I told you that it wasn't impressive. :P