Frozen Fish 1: Amiga/FrozenFish-Apr94.iso/bbs/alib/d1xx/d191/ispell.lha/ISpell/update

Text File | 1989-03-14 | 5KB | 104 lines

        Ispell enhancements - 3/13/87

(See three companion postings in net.sources.bugs).

Here are the enhancements to ispell that I mentioned a couple of days ago.
Because of the number of changes, several of the context diff's are bigger
than the original files.  In addition, many people have gotten confused
about versions, since enhancements/fixes have been made by six different
people, counting myself (for the list, see the end of ispell.man).  I
have integrated all of these fixes and enhancements in one place.

For these reasons, I have decided to repost all of the sources for ispell,
with one exception -- the dictionary.  (A couple of small files, such
as ispell.el, are unchanged, but I decided to repost them any for
completeness.  If you didn't have ispell before, you now need only the
dictionary).

The dictionary is a special case:  if you think about it, even ordinary
diff's will always work with "patch" on that each-line-is-unique file.
An out-of-place insertion can be corrected by sorting the dictionary
after patching (something that is done anyway as a side effect of the
new "munchlist" script).  Because of this, I have decided not to repost
the sizable dictionary.  In the process of testing this code, it occurred
to me to run dict.191 through UNIX "spell";  the results of that are
given in three companion postings in net.sources.bugs, which seemed
like a more appropriate place for the diffs.  (The postings are not
divided because of their size;  see comments in the postings for my
reasons).

Now, here's what I've done:

In ispell itself:

    - The personal dictionary is now hashed, just like the main one, and
      supports suffixes just like the main one.  (It's not actually
      integrated with the main one, because expanding the main one
      is inefficient and poses a minor but troublesome technical
      problem).  A personal dictionary of 28000+ words can be read in
      within a few minutes (hey, nobody's perfect -- whatcha doing
      with such a big dictionary anyway? :-).
    - New option "-c" is used by the new munchlist script to generate
      suggested root/suffix combinations.
    - The -d option can now specify /dev/null, if you want to use
      only your personal dictionary (this also saves startup time
      with -c, and is used by the "munchlist" script, which is why
      I put it in).
    - The -p option is now more flexible about its handling of pathnames.
      An absolute pathname is always interpreted literally.  A
      relative pathname from WORDLIST is looked up in $HOME first,
      then in the current directory.  The -p option behaves in the
      reverse fashion:  current directory first, then $HOME.  This
      behavior seems more intuitive to me;  I'd be interested in
      opinions of others if you don't find it intuitive.
    - Perhaps most important, I have completely overhauled the logic
      in good.c, so that it (I think) matches what the README file
      says it should, no more, no less.  The code has been extensively
      tested, notably by interaction with the new expansion scripts;
      nevertheless because of the extent of the changes and the
      nature of the logic, I'd suggest a bit of suspicion for a while.
      A technique we've found useful here is to do your normal work
      with ispell, and then do a final check with UNIX spell or some
      other slow, inconvenient program to make sure ispell didn't
      screw up.

New scripts:

    - expand.awk:  an obsolete (but correct) awk script that does
      the same thing as expand[12].sed, except slower.  The awk
      script is also much easier to understand than the sed scripts.
      Superseded by the sed scripts, except for very short input.
    - expand[12].sed:  the sed pipe

        "sed -f expand1.sed $file | sed -f expand2.sed"

      where "$file" is a raw dictionary file with suffixes
      (e.g., dict.191), generates a list of each root alone, plus
      the root expanded with each possible suffix (e.g.,
      "BOTH/R/Z" produces "BOTH", "BOTHER", and "BOTHERS").  The
      output should usually be sorted with the -u switch before
      further processing.  These scripts are used by 'munchlist';
      they are also useful for (a) checking an ispell dictionary
      with some other spell-checking program and (b) figuring
      out what a particular suffix does to a certain word without
      reading the README file.
    - munchlist.sh:  a slow, but effective, shell script that takes
      lists of expanded or unexpanded words as input and reduces
      them to a (usually smaller) list of roots and suffixes.  The
      result is written to standard output.  I think the documentation
      forgot to mention the input must be one word per line.  I
      have successfully used this script to combine dict.191 with
      /usr/dict/words;  it's also useful (and a lot faster) on
      private dictionaries.  For private dictionaries. it will also
      remove any word that has since been added to the main dictionary.

Oh yes, I almost forgot:  the original documentation didn't mention
that ispell is a long-name program.  If your "File:" display on the
top line actually contains the misspelled word, you have long-name problems.
My fixes don't address long names, because I finally have a way to
compile long-name programs, thanks to "hash8".

    Geoff Kuenning
    [e-mail]
    ...!trwrb!desint!geoff