[TUHS] Who came up with the spell check pipeline?

[Thalia Archibald via TUHS]

On Sep 3, 2025, at 01:39, Diomidis Spinellis wrote:
> 
> In Brian Kernighan's amazing VCF talk that Arnold Robbins shared
> yesterday, bwk mentions that Steve N[uancen?] came up with the famous
> spell checking pipeline: cat | tr | sort | uniq | comm
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg&t=1396s

In “The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive” (1982), Brian Kernighan
describes a similar pipeline:

   makewords sentence | lowercase | sort | unique | mismatch -�

where `sentence` is a file and the last character typed was not shown.

Spell-checking evidently teaches pipelines well, as he’s been explaining similar
formulations for a long time.

Thalia