Re: Programmers requested for dictionary

On Fri, Oct 27, 2000 at 09:03:54PM +0200, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
[snip]
> A more ambitious project, which Taliesin has mentioned already, is
> Kura: Kura will be able to do most of what you want, and more. It can
> already link between texts and lexicon, for instance. So you can click
> on a word in the text and find its definition in the dictionary, _and_
> see all lines where that word occurs in all texts in that language.
Hey, where can I get a copy of Kura? I'd love to try it out :-P

[snip]
> It's Linux only, for the moment: the gui needs KDE 1.1.2 (but I'm
> converting to cross-platform Qt 2.2.1). You need an MySQL database. I
> think it would be foolish to try and construct some multi-user data
> storage by hand.
Eeek! is there a version that isn't bound to a GUI? Sorry... I'm a CLI
freak, and I loathe to install anything beyond bare X and the most minimal
window manager (vtwm). OTOH, some programs I use require qt2.2, so that
could work. At the moment, though, I don't have enough space on my /usr
partition to install the KDE libraries.

[snip]
> >         - Ability to show words in "native" fonts (would probably have
> > to wait for the gui).
>
> This is more difficult than you might think - and not only because X font
> handling isn't as modern as you might like. But it is certainly doable, and
> will be in Kura once the conversion to Unicode-aware Python 2 and Qt 2.2.1
> is done.
Hmm... If it were up to me, I'd go for Metafont/TeX because they allow the
flexibility you need to deal with strange writing systems and conscripts.
But I seriously doubt this is ever gonna happen... because I seriously
doubt anybody here wants to bother to learn Metafont/TeX (except myself
:-P), esp. if it's just for the sake of programming a conscript.

[snip]
> I'd skip C and go for Python immediately - at least, if you're going
> for results. Very little beats Python for pure productivity - certainly
> not C, nor Java, nor C++ nor any of the other language I have done
> things in. (On the other hand, C is not as bad as Befunge 98...)
Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines -- either Python or Perl would
be best suited for this kind of project. C is too low-level for this
particular application, and C++ is just too amorphous when you want to
implement something *fast* (and please don't say the J-word ;-)).

[snip]
> A basic dictionary program, with a PyQt gui, that does what you ask _now_
> (and nothing more) is not more than a few days work with Python. If you take
> it as a language-learning exercise, it would be a bit more challenging. Doing
> it a language that requires hand-crafted memory management and doesn't play
> fair with strings will take weeks.
[snip]

*Only* weeks?! ;-) Although I've nothing against hand-crafted memory
management (in fact I *like* it 'cos then I can control exactly what the
machine does), I can see your point -- it's not worth the trouble of
tweaking little irrelevant things like that for this kind of project.


T