Question

How programs can produce programs?

Answer 1

A program, be it a script or a binary, is just a series of bytes in a file. It's not that hard to output a certain series of bytes, although the escaping can get mind bending.

Answer 2

A program is a file, programs can produce files, programs therefore produce programs . that is somewhat logical .

Answer 3

So, Internet Explorer is just a set of instructions in a file?
@rsmith6559

Answer 4

Many files (dll & exe mostly), yes. Probably about a million instructions.

Answer 5

This made me think of genetic programming:
http://geneticprogramming.com/Tutorial/

Answer 6

That genetic programming looks interesting! I wonder how close to AI it is?

Answer 7

Here's a little Python program that writes a littler Python program and runs it (on Unix, but should work on Windows):

```
#!/usr/bin/python

import os

PROGFILE = "program.py"

#### write a program file
of = open( PROGFILE, "wb" )
of.write( "#!/usr/bin/python\n\n" )
of.write( "print \"Hello World!\"\n" )
of.close()

#### make the program file executable and execute it
os.system( "chmod 0755 " + PROGFILE )
os.system( "./" + PROGFILE )
```

I need to get a life.

Answer 8

Maybe you need research about erp software. That category is a fully functional set of options for create a kind de new programs.

Or compilers that's a other category of software for create a new programs from code or scripts.

Answer 9

A program is a specific set of instructions. We can accept that one of the instructions can be a set of another instructions e.g. Functions, which are basically programs generated from a parent program to execute a specific task.