On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Andrew Coppin wrote:
How would you do this?
The approach I came up with is to slurp up the words like so:
raw <- readFile "words.txt" let ws = words raw let n = length ws let wa = listArray (1,n) ws
(I actually used lazy ByteStrings of characters.) So now I have an array of packed ByteStrings, and I can pick array indexes at random and use "unwords" to build my gibberish "sentences".
Sounds like a generator for scientific articles. :-) Maybe http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/markov-chain can be of help for you. It's also free of randomIO.
In my current implementation, all of this is in the IO monad (so I can pick things randomly).
You know of http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-December/020005.html ?