3 Aug
2006
3 Aug
'06
12:07 p.m.
der Mouse wrote:
It might be, if it weren't wrong so often. But I've seen it put up
its silly little misspelling warning for things that are in fact
spelled correctly. (Most commonly IME because they're nonstandard,
less often because it was too stupidly done to know about them.)
Second to this is failing to put up the warning for misspellings that,
for all that they are misspellings, happen to end up at the correct
spelling for some other word. (I conjecture that the latter tendency
is in large part responsible for today's pernicious misspelling of
"lose" as "loose", and quite possibly for the confusion of
"its" and
"it's".)
If the spelling checker is just dictionary based, then it chokes
as the dictionary size increases (the Hamming distance decreases!).
You need knowledge of context/grammar to get it right.
And then you're screwed by special "dialects" and subject matters.
Each time I put together a page of notes (I use FrameMaker for DTP)
and run spellcheck, it flags several dozen words as errors. Despite
the fact that they are not. Yet, fails to find others that clearly
*are*!
(and, my favorite pet peeve... complaining about spaces between
quotes/double quotes -- then refusing to gie me a way of telling
it to ignore this "problem")
Yup. Like constantly telling me I misspelled
something instead of
letting me ASK you if I've misspelled anything (or, compromise,
*remind* me to ask you...)
I've got to disagree with you on this one. Done
correctly, this is
the single greatest computer innovation of the 21st Century!