Re: Monkey texts

[Mark Perakh <perakh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The story with Jacques monkey texts took place before I joined the list
therefore I am confused. Normally the term monkey text would be applied to a
gibberish where characters are placed randomly.  In such a case, the entropy
(of all orders) would be well higher than for any meaningful text.  Now I
read that Jacques program creates a monkey text preserving the entropy of a
meaningful text.  Would you kindly explain what it is all about? Cheers to
all, Mark

Jacques Guy wrote:

> Rene wrote:
>
> > I have a copy of Jacques' good old monkey program, but as far as I
> > understand, while it can generate arbitrary text with the same entropy
> > as a given source text, this can only be shown on the screen, not
> > saved in a fail. (Correct?)
>
> Non, m'sieur, pas correct. Just press the right arrow key,
> and the text you see on the screen gets sent to a file
> MONKEY.SEZ (the text so saved is highlighted in reverse video
> on the screen). Press the right arrow key again and it
> stops being saved to disk. Again and it is saved to disk,
> again and... am I describing a *toggle*???
>
> Monkey's gibbering is *appended* to the existing MONKEY.SEZ
> (of course, if there isn't one, Monkey creates one).
>
> I really ought to rewrite Monkey from scratch, in Euphoria
> (terrific language, Euphoria, no 64K limit, automatic
> garbage collection, no dangling pointers...)
>
> Frogguy