Re: bin/48684: spell(1) is lacking

[Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 7:10 AM,  <dholland%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>>Number:         48684
>>Category:       bin
>>Synopsis:       spell(1) is lacking
>>Confidential:   no
>>Severity:       non-critical
>>Priority:       low
>>Responsible:    bin-bug-people
>>State:          open
>>Class:          sw-bug
>>Submitter-Id:   net
>>Arrival-Date:   Thu Mar 27 01:40:00 +0000 2014
>>Originator:     David A. Holland
>>Release:        NetBSD 6.99.28 (20131210)
>>Organization:
>>Environment:
> System: NetBSD valkyrie 6.99.28 NetBSD 6.99.28 (VALKYRIE) #14: Tue Dec 10 
> 15:15:49 EST 2013  dholland@valkyrie:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/VALKYRIE 
> amd64
> Architecture: x86_64
> Machine: amd64
>>Description:
>
> spell(1) is a bit lacking. While it works on simple cases, e.g.
>    valkyrie% echo 'frog' | /usr/bin/spell
>    valkyrie% echo 'frogp' | /usr/bin/spell
>    frogp
> it accepts some interesting things:
>    valkyrie% echo 'frogment' | /usr/bin/spell
>    valkyrie% echo 'frogmental' | /usr/bin/spell
>    valkyrie% echo 'froghood' | /usr/bin/spell
>    valkyrie% echo 'frogship' | /usr/bin/spell
>    valkyrie% echo 'biofrog' | /usr/bin/spell
>    valkyrie% echo 'electrofrog' | /usr/bin/spell
>    valkyrie% echo 'overfrog' | /usr/bin/spell
>
> All hail the overfrog, or something.
>
> This is because it has a set of suffix and prefix combining rules that
> it applies rather ... liberally.
>
>>How-To-Repeat:
>
>>Fix:
>
> I dunno. My inclination is towards cvs rm -- there are perfectly good
> third-party spellcheckers at this point, natural language processing
> is not exactly core OS functionality or the project's core competency,
> and I don't think there's any need to maintain our own program given
> that it doesn't work very well.
>

Hi,

I would like to take this up as a project. I have played with the idea
of a spell checker for the apropos(1) project (even implemented one,
although quite a naive implementation). I would like to take this
opportunity to come up with a more sophisticated implementation of the
spell checker and implementing it in the form of a library so that
other utilities (like apropos(1)) may also benefit from it.

Regards
Abhinav