It occurs to me, both from my own experience in writing code as well as seeing
some production code by others, that spell-checking may be useful in programming
languages.
To be specific, often user-defined entities such as variable or routine names or
attribute names or type names may be declared with dictionary words, but
sometimes they may be misspelled, and programmers may not always spot this.
I think it would be useful for programming language implementations to provide
the option to flag entity names that appear to be mis-spelled dictionary
words for programmers.
This could also be in text editors, but it could be useful in the compiler also.
What would make this different from applying a generic spell checker, is that
the code-savvy one would know to take entity names and recognize
underscore-separated or mixed-caps or mixed letters and numbers etc and parse
out the component words, so to evaluate those components, rather than looking at
words as just entire strings delimited by non-alphanumeric characters.
Not applicable everywhere, but useful in some places.
Of course, this would be an extension feature, not a core feature.
-- Darren Duncan
