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From: talmage@lti.com (David Talmage)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: Why Icon?
Message-ID: <8908291356.AA03066@lti.com>
Date: 29 Aug 89 13:56:26 GMT
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> What do you use Icon for and why? What don't you
> use Icon for and why? 
>    Ken Walker / Computer Science Dept / Univ of Arizona / Tucson, AZ 85721
>    +1 602 621 2858  kwalker@Arizona.EDU   {uunet|allegra|noao}!arizona!kwalker

It took me about two minutes to write a useable "strings" finder (a la
UNIX's strings(1)) in Icon.

I've built a travesty generator in Icon.  It's a toy built around a
frequency table.  You feed it a pattern length, n, and a text, say 5000
words from Jay McInerney's _Bright Lights, Big City_, and it prints text
that looks, statistically, as if Jay McInerney wrote it.  The output may
not be intelligible, but it is easily verified that patterns of some length
n occur with the same frequency in the input and the output.  As n
increases, the intelligibility of the output increases and so does the
output's resemblance to the input.

After hours, I'm doing some machine translation experiments in Icon.  My
Amiga now speaks, more or less, Esperanto.  By December, I think I'll have
a (possibly useful) Esperanto-to-English translator.  Would that I were a
student again so I could spend more time on this project!


DT
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David W. Talmage, Systems Programmer		...!{buita,bbn}!lti!talmage
Language Technology, Inc.			talmage%lti.uucp@bu-it.bu.edu
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