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"A Travesty Generator for Micros" by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke

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A Travesty Generator for Micros

In 1984, Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke published an article in Byte Magazine presenting a computer program for generating literary "travesties" or parodic versions of literary texts. Their code, written in Pascal, produces text such that the statistical distribution of any n-length string of characters is the same in the output as it was in the original text.

The article concludes with the source code of their program, which I've transcribed here.

To run this program, you'll need a Pascal compiler. On a Mac, I used Free Pascal which can be installed with home brew like so:

$ brew install fpc

To compile the Travesty program, run fpc in the same directory as the travesty.pas file:

$ fpc travesty.pas

If compilation is successful, you'll get two new files: travesty.o and travesty. The file simply called travesty is the executable binary, which you can run directly:

$ ./travesty

Before you do that, though, you should have a plain text file in the same directory ready to process.

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