OCaml Assignment: Pig Latin Fall 2000, David Matuszek, Villanova University

Your assignment is to write an OCaml function latinize S to translate an English sentence S (represented as a string) into Pig Latin. For example,

- latinize "when the cats away the mice will play";;
> "enwhay ethay atscay awayhay ethay icemay illway ayplay"

The rules for translating into Pig Latin are:

• If a word begins with a vowel, add "hay" to the end of the word. For example, "apple" becomes "applehay." (One dialect uses "yay" rather than "hay;" if you would rather do it this way, that's fine too.)
• 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."
• Special case: If a word consists of only consonants (e.g. "try"), just add "hay" to the end.

Simplifying assumptions:

• 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:

• OCaml 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.
• Write little functions, one at a time, and test each one out before writing the next one. This is a good technique in any language, but is especially important in OCaml.
• 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.

Extra credit:

• Handle capital letters correctly, e.g. "When..." becomes "Enwhay..."
• Retain the punctuation used in the original.
• Treat "y" as a consonant only if it is the first letter of a word; otherwise, treat it as a vowel.

Turn in:

• A floppy with a proper label on it, and your name on the label, containing the program in a file named latin.ml. You can include a file named readme.txt if there is anything in particular you want to tell us about.
• No paper, please!

Due dates: July 26 (Final exam date). No late programs, no extensions.