2 Jan
2025
2 Jan
'25
10:20 p.m.
Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
My production spell aggresively stripped
affixes and used hashing and other coding tricks to keep its
"dictionary" in the limited memory of a PDP-11. (The whole story is
told in https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/spell.pdf and insightfully
described by Jon Bentley in
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3532.315102.) When larger memory
became available, these heroics were replaced by basic common-prefix
coding patterned after Morris and Thompson, just as Arnold surmised.
But all this would have been in the C code for spell, and not in
the dictionary used, right?
Thanks,
Arnold
P.S. A few years ago I made the v10 spell available for today's systems,
see https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/v10spell.