Re: Fly-spelling with multiple dictionaries

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

martin rudalics writes:
 >  >  > I use both Ispell and Aspell for some years.  Nevertheless,
 >  >  > it's a sad story of wasted resources.  Ispell, Pspell,
 >  >  > Aspell, Myspell, Hunspell is like Emacs, XEmacs,
 > 
 > Why did you remove the - admittedly poor - pun from my original
 > posting?  The last sentence read as
 > 
 >       Ispell, Pspell, Aspell, Myspell, Hunspell is
 >       like Emacs, XEmacs, YEmacs, ZEmacs, ...
 > 
 > and YEmacs, ZEmacs, ... do not exist.

Because they don't exist, but SXEmacs and Aquamacs (to mention two
among several) do, and I assume the assorted *spells all do.  I was
unsure of your intent, so I removed the parts that could cause
confusion (at least to me).

 >  > I can't speak to the *spell issue, but there was (and is) no
 >  > alternative to maintaining a fork of Emacs that satisfies the
 >  > technical goals of the XEmacs developers and the Lucid developers
 >  > before them, because some of those technical goals (such as modularity
 >  > in code and in distribution) are unacceptable to GNU.  It's not wasted
 >  > resources, therefore, although the burden imposed on third party
 >  > developers is unfortunate.
 > 
 > You're talking to one of the persons who are convinced that Emacs and
 > XEmacs should (and do) profit from each other.

I'm also one, and therefore object to calling parallel development in
*friendly* competition a waste.  I am sad that the GNU legal
requirements present a barrier to flow of code and to some extent
ideas from XEmacs to Emacs, but again that is a necessary outcome of
the difference in goals.  (The same kind of thing is a feature of GPL
vs. BSD competition, of course.)

 > Agreed - if we were talking about Ispell and Aspell.  Unfortunately,
 > development of these packages merely stalled and the newer ones like
 > Hunspell are hardly useful for Emacs (and XEmacs).

Well, I don't know about that.  Again, the parallel to Emacsen fails.
While we long-time users have our strong preferences, for practical
purposes basic editing tasks are done the same in all the Emacsen.
(Eg, the tutorials are 95% valid across all Emacsen.)

In any case, we should think about what to do about this.  Adapt
Emacsen?  Adapt the new spell-checkers?  Ignore them?

Regards,