Subject: Re: ispell for Alpha (was Re: AbiSource, Ispell, Aspell and beyond...)
abnay@altavista.net
Date: Wed Feb 23 2000 - 11:28:26 CST
> Darren O. Benham suggested:
> >Personal opinion... you'd be better off pointing abiword at a ispell
> >dictionary generated by someone on the arch.. for example, there are ispell
> >dictionaries available for the Debian distro.
... and Paul Rohr felt:
> Darren's suggestion sounds like a very good first step. The existing code
> may work just fine if you can locate a prebuilt hash table for your
> architecture.
I tried this with no success.
> Unfortunately, the much-maligned ispell code seems to be riddled with
> assumptions about endianness and data sizes. This is a Bad Thing,
> especially since we seem to have no true ispell experts on this list who
> *like* grovelling through hash file permutations.
I am pretty frustrated at the code of ispell presently,
given that I am debugging it.
> Still, it's a problem we're stuck with (although for 32-bit platforms it
> seems to have settled down). Removing those assumptions from the existing
> codebase is likely to be ugly work (swapping int for int32 is a lot easier
> if you've been doing it all along, but the original ispell code is very,
> very old). However, this would allow folks on 64-bit platforms to use the
> many, many 32-bit dictionaries that already exist.
>
> Likewise, "fixing" it by rebuilding lots of permutations of the same
> datafile gets pretty tedious.
I believe that "fixing" is not a clean approach. I'd
rather clean the code and rid it of the endian and data
size assumptions. As Paul suggested in a later e-mail,
I should probably contact the ispell maintainers and
find out what they think. Any suggestions/help/pointers?
I also see a bit of discussion going on about
using ispell vs. aspell in AbiWord. Makes me wonder
if the time I invest in cleaning up ispell would
go a waste!! I would like to see spell checker as a
user-configurable plug-in rather than a built-in. This
will let people to choose any spell-checker along with
its corresponding dictionaries (obvious, isn't it?)...
but that's my $0.000002c worth opinion.
Bharadwaj
P.S:
An aside for all the folks that followed my gripes
about warnings generated by gcc during compilation of
AbiWord on Linux/Alpha: _These_ warnings were the red
flags that let me quickly narrow down to problem areas
in ispell code (Ofcourse this was not the first time in
my coding experience that warnings pointed me to deeper
problems in the code). So another proof of why compiler
warnings are not "just warnings" and are not to be "ignored" :-)
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