Antw: [aspell-devel] API enhancements

[Christoph Hintermueller]

Hi Andrew

>>> Andrew Dunbar <address@hidden> 21.06.03 07.40 Uhr >>>

> To achieve this efficiently, we need to be able to ask
> Aspell which languages it supports, this means an
> enumeration API to return all supported language tags:
> en, de, fr or en-US, en-GB, en-AU etc.
As far as i have insight into aspells language mechanism there is no compiled 
in list of languages supported. If spelling of a specific lanugage is supported 
rather (afaik) depends uppong availability of  entire dictionary and might be 
uppon developement state of unicode support inside aspell.
Means you will have to manually host the list of available dictionaries 
independently from aspell your self.

> We also need an API which will tell us whether a given
> language is installed or not. Currently we can just
try
> to open each dictionary but we would prefer a less
> expensive API which does not have to initialize an
> entire spelling engine which is only going to be
> destructed again.
Hm Aspell only knows dictionaries installed to dictionary path. And the 
dictionary files have a specific format and filenaming so how about doing an ls 
(unix) or dir (win) to lookup the dict for possibly installed dictionaries. As 
(afaik) aspell would have to do the same asside from checking if the files are 
real dict files (here we go again loading the files to check if tey are dicts).

In future it might be that there might be an api function returning languages 
of installed dicts, but the entire decision if and when has to be done by 
kevin. Especially as there are more important features and mechanism still to 
implement. (Affix encoding ...)

> Comment and feedback appreciated
Hope thats what you exspected.

Christoph