3 ms·
Once I heard that ca. 1990s MS Word used an embedded Prolog to perform spell check. Anyone with knowledge of this, one way or another? I can't find any document
by gamache 3y ago
Once I heard that ca. 1990s MS Word used an embedded Prolog to perform spell check. Anyone with knowledge of this, one way or another? I can't find any documentation of it online.
- jodrellblank 3y agoWord for Windows 1.1a was released in 1990 and the source code of it is available from the Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-1-1a-source-code/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-... It has 1800 lines of "SPELL.C" for 17 languages already by that time, so if there's a Prolog interpreter involved that might be a place to look. There were Word 2, Word 6, Word 95, Word 98 and Word 2000 released in the 90s as well so it's quite possible they rewrote the spellchecking several times and absense in that code won't be conclusive evidence against the idea.
- gamache 3y agoThank you for the link! Unfortunately the code in spell.c and spelcore.c seems to call out to an external DLL, whose source doesn't seem to be included here. Later versions of MS Word did the same thing, e.g., msspell3.dll.