VMs: Entropy again

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am, slowly, considering rewriting Monkey, to allow, among
other thing, for the extended (8-bit) ASCII set. At least,
now that I have installed Armenian and Cyrillic 
keyboard drivers, and the fonts, I know better what I am
up against (a mild nightmare).

I plan to have a different alphabet-definition screen, with
3 "letter types":

1. active letters
2. completely ignored letters
3. letters to be treated as spaces (word breaks)

and to allow for saving the alphabet definitions onto
disk.

Likewise, I plan to allow for saving the matrices
used for computing the entropy and generating text,
since building them is quite expensive in computer
time. This means that you could have N configuration
files for, say the VMS, one a character-monkey with
such and such glyphs ignored or treated as spaces,
another a character-monkey again but with a different
"alphabet", another a word-monkey with a particular
definition of the alphabet, another a word-monkey again
but with another definition, and so on, and so on. 
And other configurations for Russian, English, French
or whatever languages. I would have to stop short of
16-bit encoding, though, because I have no idea how
to handle displaying Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese
characters, short of going into graphics mode, and
how portable or, rather, UNportable that would become
(I am writing this in Euphoria, an interpreted language
available for DOS, Linux, and BSD at the moment. For
Windows too, but if I go into that, the code will no
longer be portable).

Of course, I expect I have missed a few things.

So, your turn.




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