[Haskell-cafe] How would you hack it?

[Andrew Coppin]

Gregory Collins wrote:
> Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> writes:
>
>   
>> Clearly, what I *should* have done is think more about a good
>> abstraction before writing miles of code. ;-) So how would you guys do
>> this?
>>     
>
> If you want text that roughly resembles English, you're better off
> getting a corpus of real English text and running it through a Markov
> chain. Mark Dominus has written a few blog posts about this topic
> recently, see http://blog.plover.com/lang/finnpar.html.
>   

This is probably overkill for my purposes.

However, if you can find me a source that explains what a "Markov chain" 
actually *is*, I'd be quite interested.

[I've seen it mentioned several times in relation to data compression, 
but Wikipedia's article is too cryptic for me to comprehend. I think 
Wikipedia is just a poor way to learn completely new concepts; 
Wikipedia's description of digital filters is also utterly 
incomprehensible, but it turns out the subject isn't actually that hard.]