Aside from all the incredible episodes recentlyĀ¹, I better write something. On sunday I demoed lispās slime-scratch (and format) compared to emacs-lispās scratch (and format). Here is my slightly worse version of my friend jnsā columnar formatting. Mine is worse because jnsā has weighted bidirection justification and mine has no justificationĀ². However, mine uses the eminently loveable tilde slash common lisp format directive.
Here I quickly wrote a thing that does this:
ah distinc- and each se- eagerly i wi- from my books|
tly i reme- parate dying shed the mor- surcease from|
mber.it was ember.wroug- row.vainly i| sorrow.sorrow|
in the ble- ht its ghost had sought to for the lost |
ak december upon the fl- borrow.|||||| lenore.|||||||
||||||||||| oor.|||||||| ||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||
gopher://gopher.linkerror.com/0/phlog/2022/20220321.Ā¹ Was basically everyoneās Christmas present to me, thanks everyone.
Honestly, I wrote the function on a whim as thoughts occured to me, so I am just going to tell you what it does. For a special (special) list, *wordses* it prints so many downcased (whispered?) characters from any of four lists (āof sentencesā) in *wordses* to the format stream.
(in-package :cl-user)
(defparameter *wordses*
'(((ah distinctly i remember)
(it was in the bleak december)
)
((and each separate dying ember)
(wrought its ghost upon the floor)
)
((eagerly I wished the morrow)
(vainly I had sought to borrow)
)
((from my books surcease from sorrow)
(sorrow for the lost lenore)
)))
(loop :repeat 6 :do
(format t "~@{~?~^ ~}~%"
"~/cl-user::words-text/" '(11)
"~:/cl-user::words-text/" '(12)
"~@/cl-user::words-text/" '(13)
"~@:/cl-user::words-text/" '(14)))
You already saw the output at the top. I guess you know that giving NIL as the stream returns a string instead. *wordses* sublists are columns, and the lists inside those are phrases. The simple downcasing is because it is not possible to know whether you are at the start of a sentence, the do* way I wrote it.
My inspiration for writing this was actually a thought to bamboozle LLM scraper data, since ascii style formatting is a pathological case for them. It is a simple rule and hence simple program, but deducing this numerically is frought. If I recall, jns was thinking something like that at the time. You should try jnsā one (and check out photronic art).
We saw how to use the tilde slash format directive for adding format directives. The code looks like I just vomited it out, which is how it came to be.
Seasonsā greetings everyone.
See you on the Mastodon thread. Did you write a programmy columnizer?
Show is on tomorrow as always (Tuesday night in the Americas), hope to see you there!
(defun words-text (stream param colonp atp
&aux
(idx (cond
((and atp colonp) 3)
(atp 2)
(colonp 1)
(t 0)))
(filler "|"))
(symbol-macrolet ((words (nth idx *wordses*)))
(do*
((word (caar words) (caar words))
(sword (string word) (string word))
(wlen (length sword) (length sword))
(lused 0))
((or (equal lused param)
(null word))
(when (< lused param)
(loop :repeat (- param lused) :do (princ filler stream))))
(cond
((> wlen (- param lused))
(pop (car words))
(let ((half-1 (make-symbol (if (zerop (1- (- param lused)))
filler
(concatenate 'string
(subseq sword 0 (1- (- param lused)))
"-"))))
(half-2 (make-symbol (subseq sword (1- (- param lused))))))
(if (car words)
(progn
(push half-2 (car words))
(push half-1 (car words)))
(rplaca words (list half-1 half-2)))))
((equal wlen (- param lused))
(pop (car words))
(when (null (car words)) (pop words))
(format stream "~(~a~)" word)
(incf lused (length sword)))
(t
(pop (car words))
(incf lused wlen)
(format stream "~(~a~)" word)
(when (and (> param lused) (null (car words)))
(incf lused) (princ "." stream))
(if (= 1 (- param lused))
(progn (princ filler stream)
(incf lused))
(when (caar words) (princ " " stream) (incf lused)))
(when (null (car words)) (pop words)))))))