Is function(){} a true quine?

Question

After poking around on the internet I wasn't able to find anyone who had written a quine in R (Edit: since writing this, have found several on SO, but am still interested in this one). So I figured I'd try my hand at coming up with one myself. My result was the (surprisingly short) code:

function(){}

which will output function(){} when run. This takes advantage of the fact that a function name without parens or arguments after it will return the function's source code.

However, a program that "looks at itself" is not generally considered a true quine. There are two things I realized I don't understand in the course of trying to decide whether I'd written a "real" quine: (1) What constitutes a program "looking at itself" (from a quine standpoint) beyond use of file i/o and (2) the extent to which function(){} (or similar commands like logical(0)) are self referential when they print themselves. The former seems to be too subjective for SO, but I was hoping for some clarification on the latter. So...

When I run function(){}, what exactly is happening that causes it to print its own "source code"? For example, is R loading an empty function into a local environment, evaluating that function, and then looking back at the code that defined it to print? Or, is it just looking at function(){} and echoing its definition right away? Is there a fundamental difference between this and

f<-function(){cat("f<-");print(f);cat("f()")}
f()

in terms of how they both print themselves when run?

Answer 1

You don't completely get what's going on here. Actually, the code

function(){}

doesn't do anything apart from constructing a function without arguments and body, returning it and deleting it immediately after it's returned. Its output would be NULL, so doesn't "recreate itself".

The output you see in the console, is not the output given by function(){} but by print.function. This is the S3 method that takes care of showing a function object in the console. What you actually do, is:

a <- function(){}
print(a)
rm(a)

A true R quine would be something like this:

m<-"m<-0;cat(sub(0,deparse(m),m))";cat(sub(0,deparse(m),m))

See also Wikipedia for this and other examples