[MUD-Dev] Re: Spellchecking

[T. Alexander Popiel]

In message:  <3608A6AD.1E19 at dial.pipex.com>
             Richard Woolcock <KaVir at dial.pipex.com> writes:
>
>From Bubba's point of view:
>
>   "Do"      : He's asking a question.
>   "you"     : He's talking about me.
>   "like"    : He's asking my opinion about something.
>   "Richard" : He's discussing a male with the forename 'Richard'.

"Do" doesn't always indicate a question.  Consider the utterance
"Do it now."

>As far as implementation of the spellchecker is concerned, I am
>considering using either a hash-table or a binary sorted tree.

>What would people recommend as the fastest sorting method, assuming
>roughly 10-30k words?

If you're working with a sorted tree, you don't need a normal sort.
(I did a deliberately low-memory implementation of a red-black tree
based string table recently, for inclusion in Penn; I can send you
the code if you're interested.)

If you really want a sort, then no single sort is the fastest; of
great relevance is the nature of the input set; if it's already
mostly sorted, then insertion sort is prolly the easiest, otherwise
I'd go with either quick sort or merge sort.  See my (still rough)
article on the topic at http://www.best.com/~popiel/sorting/top.html.

>Does anyone know where I can get such a list, short of copying them
>from a dictionary?

Some Scrabble(tm) tournament play word lists are available at
http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/.

- Alex