This line? No, it just generates all possible 3-element combinations with repetitions from a set "ACGT". There's no file handling as of yet. That's still doable, I think. Just far less likely to produce an actual line of succession. I think that I can do sort of a compromise between my lazy solution and yours "this might have to reinvent compilers" formulation: what about having a procedurally changed block or mutation parameters like 'add a nested conditional determining a future mutation type' or 'remove this loop that does something the nucleotide chain'? That only needs to comply with Python's syntax but you can add pretty much anything. Anyway, I told you that it wasn't impressive. :Plooks like it iteratively renames the file a variant of ACfileGT (the nucleotides), where the capital letters change
What I had in mind was a quine in which the actual commanding (the guts of it) randomly, iteratively changed inside of the program, but it would almost always still mutate in a way that was replicable.
While searching for help with a module error I got invited to Google foobar, which sounds like something that will keep me distracted for a while.