This is a 5-part multiquine. A multiquine should not be mistaken for a quine relay or ouroboros program - a great example of which can be found here.
The multiquine is described in great detail by David Madore (creator of Unlambda) here, but can be summed up as follows:
"A multiquine is a set of r different programs (in r different languages — without this condition we could take them all equal to a single quine), each of which is able to print any of the r programs (including itself) according to the command line argument it is passed. (Note that cheating is not allowed: the command line arguments must not be too long — passing the full text of a program is considered cheating)."
Visually, we have a graph in which we can transition to each language from any other language by specifying the appropriate command-line flag.
As a consequence, one can generate a quine relay from the 5 languages, or a subset thereof, in any sequence that you fancy.
You could also think of each language as a state, and the flags as state transitions. This suddenly looks suspiciously like some sort of state-machine, composed of quines; an interesting phenomenon.
You can boostrap the pentaquine with
$ python bootstrapper.py > pentaquine.py
Pass command-line arguments to generate successive sources:
$ python pentaquine.py pl > pentaquine.pl
Have a look at test.sh for a more comprehensive, albeit crude, testing script.
This was tested on:
- Ubuntu 12.04
with
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Python 2.7.3
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Perl v5.14.2
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newLISP v.10.4.5
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gcc version 4.6.3
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F# 3.0 (Open Source Edition)
Copyright (c) 2013 Rijnard van Tonder, @_raikey
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