Class 14: Talk Like a Pirate Day

Held: Friday, 19 September 2003

Summary: Today we will consider how to write a program that converts normal speech into something that resembles pirate speech.

Related Pages:

• EBoard.
• Lab.
• The slams.ss library.
• pirate.ss, a sample file.

Assignments

• Read Repetition with Recursion.
• Homework 2: Piratizer (due Thu).

Notes:

• I may be a few minutes late for today's class. Sorry.
• I still haven't put the documentation for the string procedures online. Sorry.
• Have a great weekend.

Overview:

• Techniques for changing dialect.
• Sample changes for piratization.
• Useful Scheme.
• Lab.

Techniques for Changing Dialect

• Now that you've observed a number of "dialect" generators, you should be able to consider some commonaities.
• What common techniques do these generators use?
• Here are some I've come up with:
  • A common set of replacement words (e.g. "for" becomes "fo")
  • A suffix added to sentences.
  • Replacing one letter by another.
  • Optional versions of any of the above.

Some Particulars

• What are some particular changes we might make?
• (Sorry, I'm not filling this part in.)

Useful Scheme

• Scheme provides a number of procedures that might help us. I've written some others.
• The (split string) procedure (mine) splits a string into a list of words.
• The (join list-of-strings) procedure (mine) joins them back together again.
• The (string=? string1 string2) procedure (standard) can be used to compare two strings in preparation for replacment.
• The (random whole-number) procedure can be used to generate an unpredictible whole number between 0 (inclusive) and the number specified (exclusive).
• The (map procedure list) procedure can be used to apply a procedure to each element of a list.
• How is that useful?
  • We split the string.
  • We replace certain words in the string using the various options.
  • We put it all back together again.

Lab

• Do The lab.
• Be prepared to reflect.