Re: [aspell-devel] Aspell on mainframe non USS

[Jose Da Silva]

On Wednesday 07 January 2009 13:27:00 Zander, Barb J. wrote:
>   Can Aspell be run in a z/OS 1.8 CICS environment?  We currently
> are running a product from IBM(DW370) to create documents and spell
> check. We are trying to find a replacement for this products spell check
> function and are wondering if Aspell would work.  Our application is
> written in Natural(SAG) code running under CICS.

Hopefully someone in the development email list would say something, but 
since nobody replied yet.... then.... looking at google, there are very few 
mentions of Aspell and mainframes, so I couldn't say yah/nah based on the 
chatter indexed by google. Lack of chatter either means A-okay, or very few 
successes.  :-/

>  Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

There are several references to aspell and s390 and linux. If I was going 
to use a code source, I would probably begin with these:
Debian = aspell 0.60.6
http://packages.debian.org/sid/aspell
Fedora (pspell)
http://rpm2html.osmirror.nl/pspell-devel.html  (maybe another source?)
Redhat:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=aspell+redhat+s390+rpm+0.60&start=0&sa=N
SUSE
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/server10/s390x/aspell-32bit.html

According to the CICS definition: CICS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS 
then Aspell would need to be highly re-entrant and if you look at the 
Aspell source code, there are a lot of "static variable" which may cause 
problems or a cause for hesitation.
Due to the way Aspell is made, some static variables are necessary, but 
some static variables are questionable if they should really be static.

Aspell is written in C++ which necessitates more stuff to compile it 
successfully and according to your question, you're likely going to use 
another type of compiler, a C++ compiler for your operating system.
You may have to strip out some of the complex scripts to get it to build.

Another option to look at is ispell. It was written originally for the 
pdp-11, due to being C and not C++ has fewer dependencies than Aspell, but 
it is a different program with fewer options.
http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/ispell.html

If you have an interest in getting Aspell to work in CICS, it would 
be nice to roll back problems found during compiling back into the 
main Aspell branch by reporting bugs found and fixed during the process.

-------------------
Some references found while reading and searching for info:
Natural: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATURAL