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70_Poetry

Poetry

This program produces random verse which might loosely be considered in the Japanese Haiku style. It uses 20 phrases in four groups of five phrases each and generally cycles through the groups in order. It inserts commas (random — 19% of the time), indentation (random — 22% of the time), and starts new paragraphs (18% probability but at least once every 20 phrases).

The phrases in POETRY are somewhat suggestive of Edgar Allen Poe. Try it with phrases from computer technology, from love and romance, from four-year-old children, or from some other project. Send us the output.

Here are some phrases from nature to try:

Carpet of ferns     Mighty Oaks
Morning dew         Grace and beauty
Tang of dawn        Silently singing
Swaying pines       Nature speaking

Entrances me        Untouched, unspoiled
Soothing me         Shades of green
Rustling leaves     Tranquility
Radiates calm       …so peaceful

The original author of this program is unknown. It was modified and reworked by Jim Bailey, Peggy Ewing, and Dave Ahl at DEC.


As published in Basic Computer Games (1978):

Downloaded from Vintage Basic at http://www.vintage-basic.net/games.html

Porting Notes

  • The program begins by switching on I, which has not been initialized. We should probably initialize this to 0, though this means the output always begins with the phrase "midnight dreary".

  • Though the program contains an END statement (line 999), it is unreachable. The program continues to generate output until it is forcibly interrupted.