spell & ispell

[Christopher Faylor]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 01:49:45PM -0500, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
>I propose to integrate in the greatly improved setup (thanks!) my ports
>of Gnu spell and of ispell that have long been available on
>ftp.franken.de They would be part of the "text" category.
>
>One issue to address is that of providing "precompiled" dictionaries
>(hash files).  Raw dictionaries for many languages and for many
>specialties are available on the Web.  The ispell package provides
>tools to compile them into hash files.
>
>I propose to include standard US and GB English hash files in the
>ispell package.  Alternatively (or in addition) we could allow separate
>packages for hash files in different languages, but this may overwhelm
>the "text" category and eventually become a problem.  Having
>"subcategories" in setup would then become useful :)
>
>OK?

Isn't aspell superior to ispell?  This is from the ispell web page:

"What's the Difference Between Ispell and Aspell?
Aspell is a spelling checker written by Kevin Atkinson.  Its primary
advantage is that it is better at making suggestions when a word is
seriously misspelled.  For example, when given "trubble", ispell will
suggest only "rubble", where aspell suggests "trouble" (as its first
choice" as well as "dribble", "rubble", and a lot of other words.  Its
disadvantage is that the approximate-matching algorithm is specific to
English."

That is not much of a disadvantage, IMO.  If it works as well as ispell
for every language besides English and works better for English then
aspell is better.

cgf