Subject: Re: AbiSource, Ispell, Aspell and beyond...
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Feb 25 2000 - 21:25:47 CST
At 10:09 PM 2/25/00 -0500, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
>Here is how it is done.
>
>6. How Aspell Works
>
>The magic behind my spell checker comes from merging Lawrence Philips
>excellent metaphone algorithm and Ispell's near miss strategy which is
>inserting a space or hyphen, interchanging two adjacent letters, changing
>one letter, deleting a letter, or adding a letter.
>
>The process goes something like this.
>
> [ ... long cool, explanation deleted ... ]
Mmmmm. Tasty. That's the meaty stuff that's been having us drooling over
your algorithms for so long now. Thanks for the explanation.
:-)
>No, I just don't like the portability standards. It has NOTHING to do with
>you but AbiSource, Mozilla, etc. viewpoint on how using such a low level
>of C++. I understand your reasons however I gcc has come along quite a
>bit sense the standards were originally advised and gcc will compile on
>almost all platforms except the mac.....
OK. Thanks for clarifying.
I'm sorry that our viewpoint is so frustrating to you, but believe me -- we
had to work *very* hard to convince ourselves not to just stay pure ANSI C.
If we had, we'd be a *lot* more popular with kernel hackers and GNOME
hackers. The number of developers we'd gain by allowing the full gamut of
modern C++ techniques pales in comparison to the number of C-only developers
that we're trying to lure over the :: fence.
>> I don't think *any* of us really understand the existing ispell code well
>> enough to help you isolate specific algorithms from it. A bunch of us
have
>> whittled around the edges on an as-needed basis, and then got out of there
>> as fast as we could.
>
>Ok, than the more I try to poke at ispell the more I think this is a bad
>idea.
One of the big reasons we still use the original ispell code is so we can
reliably read ispell-format dictionaries, which doesn't seem to be an issue
for you. If you've got a better way to generate the algorithms you need, by
all means do so.
Paul
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