Chapter 4. What's in a Word?

The most popular page on my web site (http://cfaj.freeshell.org/) is the WordFinder. It has programs for finding words that fit a pattern in a crossword grid (or on a Scrabble board). It can find anagrams, including anagrams of the word if another letter is added to it, or if one is removed from it. It can find words that begin with, end with, or contain any sequence of letters (see Figure 4-1).

These began life as C programs on my Commodore Amiga, almost 20 years ago. Combined with macros in a text editor, they constituted my system for composing crossword puzzles. Then, at a time when I couldn't afford to replace it, my hard drive crashed. I had everything backed up to floppy disks, and the Amiga could be run from ...

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