Writing Nonsense with Perl

I’m looking for a Perl script that uses recursive grammar techniques to generate random sentences. I’ve found several scripts that will throw up a string of text chosen from a pre-made list, but I’d really like to find something that generates sentences on the fly.

Randal Schwartz

Wednesday, September 15th, 1999

Share This:

I know there’ve been a few non-Perl solutions like Spew and the Dada Engine; what I’m looking for doesn’t have to be that complex — Don Cross’s JavaScript implementation is along the scale I’m thinking.

Anybody here know of something like that?

When I read this posting, I was reminded of the time, 20 years back, I wrote just such a program as a test of the UNIX YACC and LEX tools that I had just read about, called yak (for Yet Another Klugey generator, as well as the meaning of having something that yaks at you). So, I whipped out Damian Conway’s wonderful Parse::RecDescent module, with which I had been playing recently, and generated the spew program in Listing One.

Listing One: Spew

1 #!/usr/bin/perl -w 2 use strict; 3 $|++; 4 5 use Parse::RecDescent 1.65; 6 use Getopt::Long; 7 8 GetOptions( 9 “start=s” => \ (my $START = “START”), 10 ) or die “see code for usage\n”; 11 12 ## define the grammar of the spew grammar: 13 14 (my $parser = Parse::RecDescent-> new(<<’END_OF_GRAMMAR’)) or die “bad!”; 15 16 ##…

Please log in to view this content.

Not Yet a Member?