[TUHS] Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Wed Nov 22 12:58:26 AEST 2017


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."



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