Re: How Unix Spell Ran in 64kB RAM

In comp.misc, Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:16:38 -0000 (UTC), Ben Collver wrote:

Instead of relying on generic compression techniques, he took advantage
of the properties of the data and developed a compression algorithm that
came within 0.03 bits of the theoretical limit of possible compression.
To this day, it remains unbeaten.

All of which only worked for the English language (US).
 
What happened when they had to support other languages?

Pretty sure the answer is: The program was completely replaced.
No one uses spell anymore, ispell or something else gets used.

When it was written, Unix' main use to the owning company was producing
phone books with the runoff tools. Those didn't need spell checking of
customer names or addresses, and so had very little text _to_ spell
check.

Just because the solution doesn't make sense to use now, doesn't mean it
wasn't clever then.

Elijah
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probably still works better than chapgpt