Well, I have my first successful Python script, but it isn’t quite doing what I want:
#! /usr/bin/env python
import nltk
input = open('/Users/john/Dropbox/python/mm.txt', 'r')
text = input.read()
lexicon = sorted(set(text))
print lexicon
output = open('/Users/john/Dropbox/python/mm-wf2.txt', 'w')
Great stuff. Unfortunately my results are less than stellar — and, worse, while it will output to the command line, my code above creates only an empty file. Sigh.