CSC 8310   Linguistics of Programming Languages
Dr. David Matuszek,   david.l.matuszek@lmco.com
Fall 1998, Villanova University

ML Assignment

Your assignment is to write an ML program to translate an English sentence into "Pig Latin."

Pig Latin is a spoken "secret code" commonly used by American schoolchildren. Pig Latin is very simple but can be difficult to understand when spoken fast. The rules are:

• If a word begins with a vowel, add "hay" to the end of the word. For example, "apple" becomes "applehay." (Some dialects use "yay" rather than "hay;" if you would rather program it this way, that's OK with me.)
  
• If a word begins with one or more consonants, move those initial consonants to the end of the word and add "ay." For example, "strength" becomes "engthstray."

For example,

when the cats away the mice will play
enwhay ethay atscay awayhay ethay icemay illway ayplay

Simplifying assumptions:

• You don't need to read in sentences; you can define them in your program.
• Don't worry about capital letters; everything can be lowercase.
• Don't use any punctuation.
• Use single spaces to separate words.
• Always treat "y" as a consonant.

Hints:

• ML is interactive; play with it. Get used to it a little before you try to do any serious work. This will help a lot when you try to actually start using it.
• You have lots of resources available on line; do some reading, and try out some of the examples. You should be able to have ML and Netscape (or IE) open at the same time, so you can try things out as you read about them.
• ML doesn't give very good error messages, and it's often hard to tell what it's complaining about. So write little functions, one at a time, and test each one out before writing the next one.
• If you can't keep your functions small, at least build them up and test them a line or two at a time. Otherwise you'll have a big function with an error in it somewhere that you just can't find.

Turn in:

• A (paper) listing of your program.
• A (paper) transcript of a sample run of your program, showing how it converts a few sentences into Pig Latin.