[ruby-talk:13043] kernighan and pike's markov chain coding challenge

in chapter three of kernighan and pike's _the practice of programming_ they
present a table of comparisons between various languages: c, c++, java, awk,
and perl -- both lines-of-code and speed.  e.g., c takes 150 loc and 0.3 seconds
while perl uses only 18 loc for 1.0 seconds (on a 400MHz PII).

has anyone tackled the ruby version?

the basic premise is to take the king james bible version of the book of
psalms, and rearrange it in a constrained random manner so that it still
reads well, i.e., applying the markov chain algorithm to common phrases.

they have the input deck and the other pieces of code on the book's website:

   http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/code.html

(note: you have to strip out the chapter:verse numbers in the beginning of
 each line of their book of psalms input file as supplied on the webpage to
 match the word count of the input deck that they used to generate the
 table in the text: 42,685.)

-- 
bil <http://abweb.larc.nasa.gov/~kleb/>