Chapter 41. Ispell

Unless you are one of those who writes everything you write from inside one of those behemoth office-style word (or is it world?) processors, a fast, convenient, powerful, and stand-alone spell checker is a very handy thing to have around.

According to the International Ispell home page, R. E. Gorin chiseled the original out of PDP-10 assembler code in 1971. Pace Willison ported that version to C in the early 80s, and later in the decade it was adopted by Walt Buehring, who made it available on the Internet. The current version is maintained by Geoff Kuennig, who is also the guy who made it international. Isn’t open source a wonderful thing?

Luckily for us in the Unix/Linux world, we’ve had one forever: it’s called Ispell.

Putting ...

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