Re: [Haskell-cafe] How would you hack it?

Gregory Collins wrote:

Andrew Coppin writes:

...

Clearly, what I *should* have done is think more about a good abstraction before writing miles of code. ;-) So how would you guys do this?

If you want text that roughly resembles English, you're better off getting a corpus of real English text and running it through a Markov chain. Mark Dominus has written a few blog posts about this topic recently, see http://blog.plover.com/lang/finnpar.html.

This is probably overkill for my purposes. However, if you can find me a source that explains what a "Markov chain" actually *is*, I'd be quite interested. [I've seen it mentioned several times in relation to data compression, but Wikipedia's article is too cryptic for me to comprehend. I think Wikipedia is just a poor way to learn completely new concepts; Wikipedia's description of digital filters is also utterly incomprehensible, but it turns out the subject isn't actually that hard.]