Spell Checker pure Pick Basic

[Diets Nieuwoudt]

Morning to the MV community.

It has been some time my last visit (contribution). Just wondering if anyone has attempted to write a pure PICK Basic spell checker.

Diets

[David Knight]

I've not seen one; and the absence of replies from other far more learned members than I; suggest it has not been done.

That said, depending upon your environment; I'm pretty sure you could make other spell-check aware utilities work. Why re-invent the wheel?

If you were in any other environment; would you ask the same question? Likely, no - you'd go find/grab one that exists and incorporate that.

Now, if you mean a syntax-checker; more like what you get in java-esq IDE's like ECLIPSE - no, but boy one would be nice!!

[Arthur Martz]

Didn't Jet used to have one? It just bounced words against a file, if I remember correctly. 

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[Charlie Noah]

Hi Arthur,

I wrote a simple spell checker for my word processor/program editor a number of years ago, and discovered it isn't quite so simple. These are a few things I came up with. I'm sure there are more.

Document type
Is the document program source?
Is the document technical writing?
Is the document a special type which would benefit from a different dictionary?

Functions
Need to consider:
   Different forms of the same word, such as plurals, contractions, and possessives
   Line split words
   Hyphenated words
   Full words, segregated by punctuation marks or commas
   Words to skip

User Interface
Offer suggestions for incorrectly spelled words
Add/delete to the existing dictionary
Correct the spelling if the user intends to change
Mark the wrong words if there is a match and user input is incorrect
Allow users to approve or reject replacements and modify the program's operation

Regards,
Charlie

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[Peter McMurray]

CWNoah provides an excellent, erudite description of the issue however he skips the elephant in the room - as far as those of us in the real world are concerned Americans can't spell;aluminum aaargh! it is aluminium. A keen crossword player I have often wondered how they can possibly play this time-honoured game :-)

Auto-complete on a mobile phone causes rage everywhere. Worse still, I do remember a clown who though that using Latin for all his Cobol variables was clever!

On Monday, May 8, 2017 at 5:56:05 PM UTC+10, Diets Nieuwoudt wrote:

[Chris Long]

Al-yoo-min-ee-um.  Too many syllables.  The metal has cooled before you can finish saying the word.

American English is more succinct.  However, British English is more fun.

 

Chris Long

RA Services IT

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[Will Johnson]

It is true that five hundred years ago in the dawn of the Pick age, JET-EDIT had a spell checker.

It was never wildly popular, and AFAIK no longer exists anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant.

[Glen Batchelor]

I wrote a wrapper for D3 Linux eons ago that used aspell/ispell to return suggestions for words in our web product search.

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[Peter McMurray]

Good one Chris. The Birth of The Blues, four beats to the bar with emphasis on the downbeat.. So! as Roger Miller confirmed long ago, England Swings. The Triplet feel couplet on the third beat proves it :-) That must be why they called the great man Duke.

[Peter McMurray]

In order to address the original question with appropriate gravity, I ask what on earth would one do in Pick that requires a spell checker. There are lots of edit command solutions.

Nowadays one would always write a report or correspondence in the appropriate product be it Notepad, Word or the like and simply send it from Pick using PrintWizard or similar.

My preferred method is Word. Admittedly, as in Pick, one has to reset some of the awful US defaults. Pick first step is SET-DATE not forgetting the century gotya. Word and Printers need to be set for sensible paper, typically A4 - maybe a Dickens enthusiast chose the ridiculous Letter that causes all Internet printouts to waste a page if one is not careful. Spell Checker needs to be set to Australian English and the default key board to English International. I would also recommend that the document be saved as PDF for transmission, all done.

Thinking back we started using WordStar in 1982, no wonder Jet vanished. I believe that there may have been a Pick follow up for Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc that has also vanished!

On Monday, May 8, 2017 at 5:56:05 PM UTC+10, Diets Nieuwoudt wrote:

[Ed Clark]

On May 15, 2017, at 7:32 PM, Peter McMurray <pgmcm...@gmail.com> wrote:

In order to address the original question with appropriate gravity, I ask what on earth would one do in Pick that requires a spell checker. There are lots of edit command solutions.

Nowadays one would always write a report or correspondence in the appropriate product be it Notepad, Word or the like and simply send it from Pick using PrintWizard or similar.

My preferred method is Word. Admittedly, as in Pick, one has to reset some of the awful US defaults. Pick first step is SET-DATE not forgetting the century gotya. Word and Printers need to be set for sensible paper, typically A4 - maybe a Dickens enthusiast chose the ridiculous Letter that causes all Internet printouts to waste a page if one is not careful. Spell Checker needs to be set to Australian English and the default key board to English International. I would also recommend that the document be saved as PDF for transmission, all done.

Thinking back we started using WordStar in 1982, no wonder Jet vanished. I believe that there may have been a Pick follow up for Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc that has also vanished!

Yep, there was Compusheet. There was also AccuPlot which created graphs

On Monday, May 8, 2017 at 5:56:05 PM UTC+10, Diets Nieuwoudt wrote:

Morning to the MV community.

It has been some time my last visit (contribution). Just wondering if anyone has attempted to write a pure PICK Basic spell checker.

Diets

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[Arthur Martz]

What Jet was good for was mail-merge. Sending a form letter to selected customers, for example. Pulling the name and address out of the customer master file. 

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[MTaylor]

I still have a Keyword account on my system. It hasn't been used since Wordperfect came out...

Mark

[Will Johnson]

I misspoke.

It was not JET-EDIT that had the spell checker, as that was the full-screen editor for Pick BASIC programs (that's what I used it for).

It was rather the JET-IN which had the spell checker.  That was the full-screen word processor that also had all the fancy paragraphing, and fonts, and bolding and mail-merging and so on.

JET-EDIT did not have those tools as they messed up the code.  It was just a full-screen editor.

[Peter McMurray]

Form letters from Jet! Yes but how many of them were there to justify a separate package. The letter only need to be written once, I used a simple program to print them in the '70s and from then on you just feed a list to the appropriate package.

In fact back then we actually had typists who controlled the output not data entry girls (blokes felt themselves above mere keyboard duties !!).

I can consider myself as a bit of an expert in the field having been responsible for converting about 135 clerk/typists at Colonial Mutual into a typing pool of 35 typists and 100 clerks back in their own departments. We used parts of IBM composing machines to build auto form letter printers and yes we had 6 girls specifically to type unique letters for managers - were they put out about losing their personal gofer girl. My best win was getting rid of the dreadful IBM Executive typewriters with variable font and using recording typewriters or more frequently golf balls.

[Scott Ballinger]

Hi Will,

In fact, JET is alive and well. The D3 support magicians can create a JET.ABS file for interested users all the way up to 10.2 (at least for Linux).

JET-IN uses a file named "WORDS" to do spell checking. If the entries have a period between the syllables then JET-IN will attempt to hyphenate and wrap words using the WORDS file entries as well.

It's embarrassing to admit, but I have several D3 customer sites that still use JET-OUT form letters for legal documents.

/Scott Ballinger

Pareto Corporation

Edmonds WA USA

206 713 6006

[Will Johnson]

I am surprised to learn that JET is still being sold by any vendor.

I've been looking for JET to use on a Universe on Windows installation for a few years, but Rocket states that they no longer have it or sell it or something of that sort.