Talk:Indirect self-reference

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Cute. Indirect self-reference indirectly self-references itself. Should this be a real article? -- Wapcaplet

yes Vera Cruz

Perhaps some more clear explanations in regards to the "when quined" and "yields a false" examples are in order? Darquis 23:38, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Of particular interest is the quine

"yields a false statement when preceded by its quotation" yields a false statement when preceded by its quotation

which forms a paradoxical statement without using pronouns or any method of direct self-reference.

I beleive "its" is indeed a pronoun, could that sentance be worded more clearly? 170.171.1.5 21:04, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. "Its" is a possessive pronoun! Matt2h

whether its is a pronoun or not, it is a form of self reference. This contradicts what the section is trying to prove. I wonder we can infer the "its" the same way as the sentence infers a "this" in the beginning. So in other words change the sentence from:

[this] yields a false statement when preceded by its quotation

to

[this] yields a false statement when preceded by [its] quotation

Now the question is, do the implied pronouns not get preprocessed by our brain and added in for clarity? So is this not just a hacky self reference?

Incorrect example

I believe this text is incorrect:

This example is similar to the Scheme expression "((lambda(x)(x x)) (lambda(x)(x x)))", which is expanded to itself by beta reduction, and so its evaluation loops indefinitely despite the lack of explicit looping constructs. (That behaviour derives from Scheme's eager evaluation rule. The equivalent expression in lambda calculus has no normal form, for the same reason, but is not otherwise as problematic as it is in Scheme.)

In particular, there is no difference between Scheme and lambda-calculus for the given example, so I'm going to remove the second part. In Scheme, and in most call-by-value functional languages (all that I know of), lambda-abstractions are considered values, and are thus not further reduced, even if the are arguments of an application. If you disagree even after reading the explanation, please discuss it here before editing back in the text I removed. --Blaisorblade (talk) 06:32, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

References

I remember reading most of this in "Godel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter. Should this reference be added? DrJamesEast (talk) 04:50, 8 January 2013 (UTC)