From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2017 13:58:26 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from In-Reply-To: <15d26202-091f-0b04-146c-79f53f3aad23@gmail.com> References: <201711211608.vALG81PQ014303@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20171121214854.E815A2032E@orac.inputplus.co.uk> <15d26202-091f-0b04-146c-79f53f3aad23@gmail.com> Message-ID: 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."