As you mention, Lisp does better with lists, for sure. But if there's one datatype where Perl outshines them all, it's with strings. So if you want to make it more Perlish, why not translate it from a list manipulation problem into a string manipulation problem? Let the great regex support do the heavy lifting: 
my %dict = (
  SENTENCE => ["NP VP"],
  NP       => ["ART NOUN"],
  VP       => ["VERB NP"],
  ART      => [qw/ the a /],
  NOUN     => [qw/ man ball woman table /],
  VERB     => [qw/ hit took saw liked /]
);

sub rand_production {
    my $items = $dict{+shift};
    return $items->[rand @$items];
}

sub generate {
    local $_ = shift;
    my $nonterminal = join "|", map quotemeta, keys %dict;
    1 while s/($nonterminal)/ rand_production($1) /e;
    return $_;
}

print generate("SENTENCE"), $/;

[download]

blokhead

In reply to Re: Perl can do it, take 1 (sentence generation) by blokhead
in thread Perl can do it, take 1 (sentence generation) by spurperl

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.