Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!att!occrsh!occrsh.ATT.COM!scsmo1.UUCP!tim
From: tim@scsmo1.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: Dictionary word look-up
Message-ID: <1400005@scsmo1.UUCP>
Date: 24 Apr 89 03:57:00 GMT
References: <772@ks.UUCP>
Lines: 22
Nf-ID: #R:ks.UUCP:-77200:scsmo1.UUCP:1400005:000:943
Nf-From: scsmo1.UUCP!tim    Apr 23 21:57:00 1989



You can use /usr/lib/spell/spellprog to check words against the dictionary.
Open 2 pipes, one to the process, one from the process, fork, then execl to
spellprog.

I sent a program to do just this to comp.srcs.unix but have not heard from
rsalz so...  If you want it, I will send it.

The spell program is flakey, I would not use it.  The dictionary hashing
is too small so it misses lots of words.  It was written to make use of
a 20K word dictionary on disk with no large memory use.  This machine
will give me 8M of virtual, so that is no longer a concern but spell is
still there.  It sort the words, mine does not. I have yet to find a
document that spell is faster on.  My will also give more wrong words,
as it will not check agains a local file and it things any numbers are
wrong.

I was considering using the hyphenation method from TeX to generate a
hash value and use it in a very sparce matrix of all the words.

tim@scsmo1.uucp