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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!ut-sally!utah-cs!utah-gr!spline!thomas
From: thomas%spline.uucp@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.4bsd,comp.text
Subject: Re: bug in spell
Message-ID: <1943@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Mar-87 23:57:50 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1943
Posted: Thu Mar  5 23:57:50 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Mar-87 00:13:40 EST
References: <13292@cmcl2.UUCP>
Sender: news@utah-gr.UUCP
Reply-To: thomas%spline.UUCP@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Organization: Univ of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 10
Keywords: spell spellin aniversery
Xref: mnetor comp.bugs.4bsd:205 comp.text:507


Spell uses a hash table to determine correctly spelled words.  The
chance of a misspelled word hitting a `1' in the hash table is small,
but non-zero.  Spell will pass many totally garbage sequences of
characters as being spelled "correctly".  It is unfortunate that your
misspelling of "anniversary" gets a hit.  We should note, however,
that spell would run *much* slower if it attempted to look each word
up in a dictionary.

=Spencer   ({ihnp4,decvax}!utah-cs!thomas, thomas@utah-cs.ARPA)