🚀 go-pugleaf

I finally got around to reading through the responses to my posting about the 
bug in spell.  To refresh your memory I had the word "aniversery" accepted by 
spell with an hlist that I knew did not contain the word.  The best (and only)
description of what must have happened follows:

***** start of response *****

From: mcnc.org!ecsvax!dukeac!bet@seismo.UUCP

Perhaps (I'm not sure) you've found an instance of a potential failure mode
that spell has always had. I had never heard of an example before. Here's the
situation: spell(1) wants to have a reasonably huge number of possible words
in its dictionary, wants to be able to run in a reasonably small amount of
memory, and wants to be FAST. So, they set up a table in memory (50K bytes)
and treat it as a bit array (400K bits). Then they compute, for each word, N
independant hash functions in the range [0-400K]. For each word, they turn on
the N bits at the locations identified by the N hash functions. N is chosen
depending on the size of the hash table and the number of words, so that
approximately 1/2 of the bits are turned on in the final table (which
obviously maximizes the information content of the table). This comes to 11 in
the standard UNIX spell, if I recall correctly. This means that the odds of
any random string being in the dictionary are 1 in 2**11 == 1/2048 -- right
small. Seems like you might have found such an example, however. If I recall
the implementation of the full spell(1) command, it is a shell script that
calls the spelling check program twice, first with a stop file which is a hash
table of words to insist are misspelled, regardless of whether they are in the
dictionary, then runs the remaining words through the regular dictionary. The
stop list mechanism was put in place, as I recall, as a method of trapping
words that would be (mistakenly) accepted due to misbehavior in the
prefix/suffix stripper (the example I recall is "thier == thy - y + ier");
however, it seems to me you should be able to add your example word to the
hstop word list and rebuild the hstop table, and fix the problem that way. 

-Bennett
-- 
Bennett Todd, Duke User Services, Durham, NC 27706-7756; +1 919 684 3695
UUCP: ...{philabs,akgua,decvax,ihnp4}!mcnc!ecsvax!dukeac!bet
BITNET: DBTODD@TUCC

***** end of response *****

While I did not get around to trying this fix, it does sound good.  Good luck
to everyone not having this happen to them with other mispelled words!

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Laurence S. Kaplan						     |
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