I probably won't have time to continue with AWK this semester, but I'll try resurrecting that theme again too.
For now, just a short rant about Spellcheckers:
Why are some singular forms of nouns permissable and at the same time the plural forms of the same nouns marked as errors?
I unfortunately don't have the example that drew my attention on hand (this happened a couple of months ago and I didn't write down the culprit word at the time), so this post must stay no more than a rant. Also, I am dealing with Openoffice 3.2. Maybe MSOffice is excempt from this problem, but I doubt it.
Apparently there is no mechanism that ensures that the plural forms of acceptable nouns are acceptable too. This is confirmed by the fact that if you add a word to the dictionary manually, the plural form is not created as well, but needs to be added separately the same way the singular form was added: by hand.
I wonder if this is done on purpose. Who should I ask?
Generating acceptable plurals algorithmically is tricky, since there are a number of different rules for forming plurals, and those rules have exceptions. A certain amount of human input is required, so it's possible that OO's word list is simply incomplete or out-of-date.
ReplyDelete-Ben