Dada-Engine

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The Dada Engine Release 1.01

The Dada Engine is a system for the nondeterministic generation of ASCII data from grammars using recursive transition networks; or, in English, it is a system for generating random text using rules. Rules are specified in a language named pb, which looks a little like yacc, only a good deal more bogus. The language is documented in the Dada Engine manual which is supplied in Texinfo and PostScript formats.

Release 1.01 is a bugfix release which fixes a problem with regular expression substitutions in 1.0. Nothing else is changed.

Compiling and installing

Firstly, run the shell script named "configure" in the Dada Engine distribution directory. This will check the characteristics of your system and (hopefully) set up the makefiles and headers in a way that will work. configure, by default, sets the installation directories in which the Dada Engine will be installed to /usr/local; if you wish to install the Dada Engine elsewhere, you can specify a different location by running configure with the "--prefix=pathname" argument, i.e., "./configure --prefix=$HOME" will install the system in your home directory.

Then run "make" in the distribution directory; this will compile the Dada Engine. Afterwards, for it to properly work, you must install it by running "make install".

Sample scripts

Several sample scripts are provided in the `scripts' subdirectory. These include:

brag.pb*	A SubGenius brag generator
crackpot.pb	A crackpot rant generator
eqn.pb		A generator of bogus equations (in LaTeX format)
exam.pb		A script to generate intimidating-looking but bogus 
		examination questions.  (unfinished)
legal.pb*	A script to generate legalese.
loop.pb*	A script that produces itself as output
manifesto.pb	A manifesto generator
pomo.pb		The Postmodernism Generator; now outputs in any
		format supported by the format library
silly-word.pb	A silly word generator
spout.pb*	The SubGenius Profunditied Generation Matrix

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mitchell Porter for testing the language and coding several of the example scripts, to the Department of Computer Science at Monash University for facilities and support, to Jamie Cameron for his part in the conspiracy to develop this system and to Brandon Long and kristin buxton for their help with getting the Dada Engine to work with Solaris 2.x.

Andrew C. Bulhak [email protected] 45 Discord 3162