🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4580@cluster.cs.su.oz.au> marcos@netcom.com (Marcos H. Woehrmann) writes:
>But based on that statement the claim in the dictionary search algorithm
>that covers stopping if the first n letters of the word aren't in the
>dictionary would have been disallowed since I've been looking up words
>in the dictionary using that technique for years.  

The spelling checker patent claims specifically refer to using a certain
hierarchical data structure for the dictionary, not an alphabetic list of
words.  I don't know about you, but whenever I manually look up words in
the dictionary, the dictionary has simply been an alphabetic list of words.

Actually, there's one way in which lookups in paper dictionaries might be
similar to the patented process.  Many dictionaries have cutouts to make it
easy to open directly to a particular first letter.  I think the patent
claims refer to a dictionary structure that uses a different structure for
the first N characters than the remaining characters.  However, I still
don't think the patent describes the second level of structure as being
alphabetically ordered.
-- 
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com          {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar