The function of the Did You Say CGI is primarily to repeat back whatever the user says. For example, if the user says
The quick red fox jumped over the lazy green zebra.
the CGI replies:
Did you say 'The quick red fox jumped over the lazy green zebra.'?
This is indeed a minimalist CGI. One might say the hello world of dialogue CGIs.
I believe the first version of this program I wrote was done in SNOBOL on a Scientific Data Systems 940 (the first commercially successful time sharing system). It was the first program I wrote for my children. My children seemed to get great pleasure out of the program's cluelessness. One of them would type in some nonsense like:
qwertyuiop asdfghjkl
and the program would reply:
Did you say 'qwertyuiop asdfghjkl'
This would be followed by gales of laughter.
The current version of the program is a perl CGI running in the context of an Apache web server on a BSD Unix operating system.
© Copyright 2002 George Woolley