Random generator exercise

[miscdas at boxfrog.com]

Mr. Couch, 

Here is twist on your random string generator. 

## This routine builds an alphanumeric string that is approximatly 50% alpha 
(52 characters)and 50% numeric (50 characters).
## This results in nearly equal probability that an alpha or a numeric 
character is selected.
## Characters are selected at random from the built string to produce an 
output string.
## You can see that this can be readily generalized to using any source 
(such as an exernal file) for building the alphanumeric string with the 
probablity of returning any character corresponding to its frequency in the 
text. 

on mouseUp
## some initializations
 ask "How many characters do you want?  (# from 1 through 9)"
 put it into lengthOutputString
 put empty into field 1
 put empty into myNum
## this provides 50 numeric characters
 repeat 5 times
   put myNum & "0123456789" into myNum
 end repeat

## This provides 52 letters, half upper and half lower case
 put "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" into myAlphaUpper
 put toLower(myAlphaUpper) into myAlphaLower

 put (myNum & myAlphaUpper & myAlphaLower) into myText 

##  Build the output string
 repeat lengthOutputString times
   put any character of myText after field 1
 end repeat
end mouseUp 


Another option for getting the output string is to randomize MyText, then 
select characters 1 through lengthOutputString 

miscdas