One of my most favourite recursive acronyms is XINU which stands for "XINU Is Not Unix". The delightful thing about this acronym is that "XINU" is also the reverse of "UNIX".
Upon a closer look, it turns out that for a given word W, a recursive acronym proclaiming that it is not W while simultaneously being the reverse of the word W, we need W to be of the form W = "?NI?" where each "?" denotes a distinct letter. Some fictitious examples:
* ANIL ⇒ LINA = LINA Is Not ANIL.
* KNIT ⇒ TINK = TINK Is Not KNIT.
Words of the form "?N?" also work if we are happy with a contracted "is" in the acronym. In fact we can get circular recursive acronyms in such cases:
* ANI = ANI's Not INA ⇔ INA = INA's Not ANI.
* ONE = ONE's Not ENO ⇔ ENO = ENO's Not ONE.
Both acronyms in each pair refer to each other thus making them circular while also being the reverse of each other! These could be useful names to express friendly banter between rival projects.
Wow! I was an avid reader of the XKCD comics about 15 years or so ago but I somehow missed this one. For others who are wondering what this is, here's the link to the relevant XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/917/
What is so clever about this phrase is that it naturally completes to a full sentence that contains itself as an acronym!
I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym IS META!
A wonderful tribute to Hofstader's books that are full of such fascinating self-references.
Ah, good ol'e Dr Comer. Back in school I worked on a project rewriting XINU in Rust. It was quite difficult in the early days of Rust, but it was a fun project to get insight into how XINU worked.
One of my most favourite recursive acronyms is XINU which stands for "XINU Is Not Unix". The delightful thing about this acronym is that "XINU" is also the reverse of "UNIX".
Upon a closer look, it turns out that for a given word W, a recursive acronym proclaiming that it is not W while simultaneously being the reverse of the word W, we need W to be of the form W = "?NI?" where each "?" denotes a distinct letter. Some fictitious examples:
* ANIL ⇒ LINA = LINA Is Not ANIL.
* KNIT ⇒ TINK = TINK Is Not KNIT.
Words of the form "?N?" also work if we are happy with a contracted "is" in the acronym. In fact we can get circular recursive acronyms in such cases:
* ANI = ANI's Not INA ⇔ INA = INA's Not ANI.
* ONE = ONE's Not ENO ⇔ ENO = ENO's Not ONE.
Both acronyms in each pair refer to each other thus making them circular while also being the reverse of each other! These could be useful names to express friendly banter between rival projects.