22 Nov
2017
22 Nov
'17
8:58 a.m.
On Tue, 21 Nov 2017, Will Senn wrote:
On a historical note, I am curious if anyone on the
list remembers much
about the development of the first spell checkers in Unix? Good 'ol
remarkably accurate wikipedia suggests that it is descended from SAIL's
DEC PDP-10 version. Who wrote the first standalone tool for unix and did
they, as the wikip article says, base it on the DEC PDP-10 version
(surely it would have been c, not assembly)? I see the man page for it
in v6, but no executable.
There was a shell script that split the words on white space and sorted
them by occurrence; the least-used ones were most likely spelling misteaks
(unless you were a consistent mis-speller, which regretfully some people
are).
No idea where I heard about it... Was it "Programming Pearls"?
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."