In all the annals of knighthood, no personality trait has been in more dire need than the fortitude to withstand the diplomatically deleterious effects of a vicious, relentless taunting. Tasked with strengthening the mental endurance of Camelot’s knights, King Arthur's court decided that instructional taunting must be applied, yet it could not be delivered by the chivalrous administration. Thus, Sir Lancelot commanded a local anarcho-syndicalist peasant to write a program that generates taunts (a.k.a. mudslinging) thereby producing a script to test the patience of knights in a training environment. To prevent unbridled creativity in taunting from spoiling the otherwise stately proceedings of a nobleman’s education, the following rules designed by committee (The Round Table) must be adhered to:
<taunt> ::= <sentence> | <taunt> <sentence> | <noun>! | <sentence>
<sentence> ::= <past-rel> <noun-phrase> | <present-rel> <noun-phrase> | <past-rel> <article> <noun>
<noun-phrase> ::= <article> <modified-noun>
<modified-noun> ::= <noun> | <modifier> <noun>
<modifier> ::= <adjective> | <adverb> <adjective>
<present-rel> ::= your <present-person> <present-verb>
<past-rel> ::= your <past-person> <past-verb>
<present-person> ::= steed | king | first-born
<past-person> ::= mother | father | grandmother | grandfather | godfather
<noun> ::= hamster | coconut | duck | herring | newt | peril | chicken | vole | parrot | mouse | twit
<present-verb> ::= is | “masquerades as”
<past-verb> ::= was | personified
<article> ::= a
<adjective> ::= silly | wicked | sordid | naughty | repulsive | malodorous | ill-tempered
<adverb> ::= conspicuously | categorically | positively | cruelly | incontrovertibly
Note that all phrases in double quotes are to be treated as one word for taunt simulation output.
The number of taunts elicited at any given time is derived from the number of words spoken by the knight. For every three words (or fraction thereof) delivered by the knight, the generator produces one or more taunts in a theater-style script format. In the event that 2 taunts must be produced on a single line, they will be counted as 2 taunts towards the total required. By a mandate from the masses, a word will always contain at least one alphabetic character, and will be separated from other words by at least 1 space.
In exception to the above rules, whenever the program finds the holy grail, which is to say, the letters t-h-e-h-o-l-y-g-r-a-i-l (case insensitive) in that order in a line of input, then the first taunt generated will be displayed by the program as "(A childish hand gesture)".
To ensure all royal quality assurance criteria are met, the program must be demonstrated by a simulation showing the taunts produced from a series of inputs. Each taunt is generated by applying the taunt generation rules until all of the <...> have been replaced with appropriate words. In most cases, you will face a choice of alternate rules for expanding a phrase name. In these cases, you should make a choice as follows: Suppose that this is the
kth such choice that you have faced for that rule since the start of program execution, and that you must choose one of
n rules for expanding a given kind of phrase. Let the rules for that phrase be numbered from
1…n in the order of appearance above, and then choose rule number
((k-1) mod n) + 1.
Well, get on with it!