On 12/4/05, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> begin quoting Carl Lowenstein as of Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 04:20:49PM -0800:
> [snip]
> > I think that the base spelling program uses a compressed dictionary so
> > this probably won't work. I would look for evidence that it has
> > created your own private dictionary of extra words.
>
> Then one would think that /usr/dict/words would be compressed, then.
>
> > But it probably sorted and compressed that too. Remeber that all
> > these spelling programs started out in the days when 64MB was a pretty
> > big computer memory.
I think I had a generation slip here, and meant "64kB was a pretty big
memory" :-(
> And a reasonable dictionary file might be a few hundred k -- and it's
> not like you'd load in the dictionary file into memory. It's sorted,
> too, which is the important bit. A compressed format would mean you'd
> have to read and uncompress the entire file (up to the point you want)
> rather than simply seeking about halfway and then reading a few bytes.
>
> I think that ispell (versus aspell-with-a-wrapper) keeps the local
> dictionary in uncompressed format. At least, I have an "ispell.words"
> file hanging around from who-knows-when that's uncompressed.
>
> > > Or you can use strace to see what files it opens. Check for
> > > ~/.ispell_words
> > > and friends.
> >
> > Yes. Or try to read the documentation, which might be more difficult.
Before making that suggestion, I went to where the sources are, and
did a quick browse through the documentation. It is really dense and
full of things you didn't really want to know. And hard to find
things you do want to know.
Historically speaking, we have a problem, in that there were two
programs developed independently, ispell and aspell. At a later time,
someone wrote a shell script wrapper for aspell to make it
command-line compatible with ispell. The internals are not the same.
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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