Q: Why is is written in Rexx, and what is Rexx?
Once back in the ninties, I wrote an interpreter for a computer
programming language called Rexx. Svada was initially an exercise in
that language, just a "cool" program to test my interpreter and show
how the language worked. You can find out more about Rexx and Regina
from Mark Hesslings Rexx.org.
Q: What is the origin of Svada?
The first time I saw the program, it was written in FORTRAN for
computers from Norsk Data. The original program must have been written
in the late seventies or early eighties by an unknown
programmer. Around 1993 I rewrote it in Rexx, porting the general idea
rather than the code itself. In 2004 I set up an interface so that
people could use it from the Web.
Q: Can I get my own copy?
Sure. Regina is GPL, as is Svada. Here is
the source code of Svada. You need a grammar file, which exists in
different flavours, but I recommend the general. If you want to set up a web interface,
you need a kind of wrapper.
Q: If I wanted to put a URL on my own web page, and have it
expand to a page of svada, what should it be?
Quite simple, generate a page, and cut-n-paste the URL of the newly
generated page to you own HTML-code. However ... if a large number of
people do this (and refers to output with zillions of lines), search
engine crawlers and so forth will ensure that my site will have no
bandwidth left. So please, if you want to do that, set up Svada on
your own site, or at least let the 'lines=' parameter use a small
number of lines.
Q:Does it work? Are anybody fooled by these texts?
I don't know ... A number of people have tried to include output
from Svada into draft versions of their reports and other documents
(although never in the final version, as fasr as I know). Sometimes,
it has gone unnoticed, maybe because nobody looked at exactly that
part of the document. If you know a good (and true) story about
someone being fooled by Svada output, please tell me.
Q: If anybody are fooled, why is that so? It is just a sequence
of random words linked together by a grammar.
I do not know why, but I have a theory. Many of the words in
Svada's dictionaries are abstract word, or words with a fuzzy
definition, or words which most people simply don't know what mean. At
least, by the time they are stringed together, it is hard to extract a
concrete and clear meaning. The use of such words and phrases requires
some interpretation by the reader, during which the reader himself
creates the only meaning of the text. Consider an example: The
final aspect of an approach is functionally interwoven with a prime
confrontation. At least my brain start working on this sentence
like it was a jigzaw puzzle. It presumes there is a pattern or a
meaning in this, and it works to find it. Along the way, it creates
that meaning. (By the way, that is probably the way that Tarot and
some other divination techniques works: By presenting you with white
noise and require your brain - and subconscience - to work out a
meaning.)
Q: Can Svada reproduce a certain output?
Technically: Yes. It uses the random() function in Rexx (which uses
the equivalent function in C), and it is initialized every time Svada
starts. Thus, the output will generally be different. However, I plan
to enable the user to pick a seed to the random generator.