amlovell@phoenix.princeton.edu (Anthony M Lovell) (11/15/88)
Posting-number: Volume 5, Issue 52
Submitted-by: "Anthony M Lovell" <amlovell@phoenix.princeton.edu>
Archive-name: trav.tc
This program turns ordinary text into infinite, amusing gibberish.
I think the original algorithm was called TRAVESTY.
This program is an implementation of an algorithm a friend told me about
that might have been published in an old BYTE magazine article. If
coding up such a thing violates any copyright laws, I understand that I
will be fed drugs that slow my perception of time and then fed feet
first into a tree chipper. I have not bothered to put it in a shell
script since I never really understood what they did or how they're
used.
The program reads the standard input for a textfile (which must be
<BUFSIZE in length). It expects an <order> integer to be supplied on
the command line. It will immediately output the first <order>
characters of the input. Then a loop outputs characters one at a time
until a break is issued from the keyboard.
Loop goes thusly:
1. consider the last <order> characters output as a string S.
2. find all occurrences of S within the input file.
3. Consider all characters C that immediately follow each instance of S.
4. Select one char from C at random, output it, and loop to 1.
The results must be seen to be appreciated.. it is something like a
drunkard trying to recount a story you told him for orders ~7 and it is
like crack addicts for orders ~2-3.
Let me know what you think of this program.
Program source code follows:
/* cut here, and call the file trav.c and compile w/ TC 2.0 under MSDOS */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#define BUFSIZE 32768
#define MAXORDER 16
#define MAXCANDS 256
char *buf;
unsigned int bs;
int order,linelen;
char lastout[MAXORDER];
char cands[MAXCANDS],outtahere;
unsigned int readbuf()
{ char temp[256];
int i;
buf = (char *) malloc(BUFSIZE);
strcpy(buf,"");
while (!feof(stdin)) {
scanf("%[^\n]\n",temp);
strcat(buf,strcat(temp," "));
}
return(strlen(buf));
}
findcands()
{ char *pp; int i;
strcpy(cands,"");
pp = buf;
while ((pp = strstr(pp,lastout))!=NULL)
{ i = strlen(cands);
cands[i] = *(pp+order); cands[++i] = '\0';
pp++;
}
}
restart()
{
strncpy(lastout,buf,order);
linelen = order;
printf("\n%s",lastout);
}
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
randomize();
if (argc<1 || (!(order = atoi(argv[1]))))
{ puts("USAGE: TRAV <order> where <order> is an integer 2-10.");
exit(1); }
bs = readbuf();
restart();
while (kbhit()) getch();
while (!kbhit()) {
findcands();
if (cands[0] == '\0')
{ restart(); findcands(); }
outtahere = cands[random(strlen(cands))];
putchar(outtahere);
lastout[order] = outtahere;
lastout[order+1] = '\0';
movmem(lastout+1,lastout,order+1);
linelen++;
if (linelen > 55 && isspace(outtahere))
{ puts(""); linelen = 0; }
}
} /* end of program file trav.c */
--
amlovell@phoenix.princeton.edu ...since 1963.