On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 10:22 -0500, Michael Bentley wrote: > On Apr 13, 2007, at 9:19 AM, Paul McGuire wrote: > > > If you just expand the length to five million* or so, one of those > > strings will contain all the works of Shakespeare. > > Not likely, even with a tiny sampling of the works of Shakespeare:
Actually, the OP seems to be interested in generating *all* strings of length N. If you generate the set of *all* strings of 5 million characters length, at least one of them will contain all works of Shakespeare. That statement is utterly true and utterly impractical, which is, of course, the point of Paul's joke. -Carsten -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list