Re: German Dictionary (fwd)
On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Thanks for the hint. I'm interested in it and if noone objects
> this could be taken as an "Intent to package" message.
I looked at steak yesterday evening something closer and I have to say
it is a useful tool. Unfortunately I consider it to be technically
bad designed. The source is shipped with a 3.4 MByte sized database.
The installation process blows it up to 5.4 MByte by doubling the
German words which are originally without umlauts (`"a' is spelled
as `ae', `"s' ist spelled as `ss', ...). This translation follows
the rules of a simple sed script. I didn't understand the magic
why the word `Strasse' is correctly translated to `Stra"se' (read
the German sz here as is typeset by TeX) but the word `Essen' is
left (which is correct but I havn't understand the magic of the
code which is able to distinuguish both `ss' which to translate and
which not).
Anyway the size of the word database is increased by a certain rule.
The translating work is done by a shell script by using several
grep and sed commands. In my opinion this could be done with
perl much better and faster. Once using perl the umlaut translation
could be done on the run and so the increase of the size could be
avoided.
So my question is: Is there any perl programmer who wants to do
the translational work? The amount is
> wc steak
444 1240 12024 steak
of code which seems to be quite easy to port. I've started perl
programming two weeks ago and so I'm a very beginner. If I had the
time I could do it, but it wouldn't be very good code.
In my opinion it ist worth the effort. Other languages could be
added.
By the way, there seems to be an error in the program and I could
track down it, if you decide that I should do the packaging work
in the way it is. But at first I would like to hear comments if
somebody thinks we should enhance the program in the way I described.
Kind regards
Andreas.
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