Text-to-speech

[Steve Holden]

Tim Churches wrote:
> Charles Hartman wrote:
> 
>>Does anyone know of a cross-platform (OSX and Windows at least) library
>>for text-to-speech? I know  there's an OSX API, and probably also for
>>Windows. I know PyTTS exists, but it seems to talk only to the Windows
>>engine. I'd like to write a single Python module to handle this on both
>>platforms, but I guess I'm asking too much -- it's too hardware
>>dependent, I suppose. Any hints?
>>
>>Charles Hartman
>>Professor of English, Poet in Residence
>>http://cherry.conncoll.edu/cohar
> 
> 
> No, but I do wonder how many other users of Python are
> poets-in-residence, or indeed, published poets?
> 
> And congratulations on the release of Scandroid Version 1.0a (written in
> Python) on 18.iii.05 (as you elegantly record it).
> 
> All this begs the question: Have any poems been written in Python
> (similar to the well-known Perl Poetry (see
> http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/Perl/Poetry/
> )?
> 
> Indeed, have any poems ever been written about Python - other than "The
> Zen of Python" by Tim Peters? A limerick, even?
> 
> There once was a language called Python...
> 
> (which is pretty close to having three anapaestic left feet)
> 
> or more promisingly, rhyme-wise, but metrically rather worse :
> 
> There once was a mathematician named van Rossum...
> 
> Tim C
> 
Of course this last suggestion clearly has the wrong meter for a good 
limerick. Not everyone knows the ingredients of a good limerick, which 
led to the following (which has been around in various forms since God 
was a lad):

There was a young man from Japan
Who never quite learned how to scan.
   He got on quite fine
   Until the last line
And then somehow he could never quite get the number of syllables 
right,or make it rhyme.

So, let's accept that the first line should scan correctly, that would 
make the following first lines acceptable:

A mathematician named Guido ...
The inventor of Python, called Guido ...
A mathematician (van Rossum) ...
Van Rossum, inventor of Python ...

Hopefully that will begin to get the idea across.

Since it's PyCon week, I will offer a prize of $100 to the best (in my 
opinion) limerick about Python posted to this list (with a Cc: to 
pycon at python.org) before midday on Friday. The prize money will be my 
own, so there are no other rules. I will post my judgment when the PyCon 
nonsense has died down a little, but the winner will be read before the 
entire PyCon audience. Get to it!

regards
  Steve
-- 
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