Development Plan | Programming | Testing | Slips | Roadmap

Organisation

There is an effort to establish an organisation to carry on the maintenance of WORDS, both the dictionary and the software. The original author suggested the following:

An eventual outcome would be to have some institution, with real Latin capability, provide an exhaustive and authoritative program of this nature. Until then, I and other individuals will make available our programs.

Packaging

Packaged versions based on the current source code will be made for Windows, MacOS and Linux; the tools for this will need to ensure the right data files are included or generated, and that the package does not accidentally ship copyright-infringing code, a genuine possibility.

Macrons

We shall re-annotate the dictionary with macrons to mark vowel length; the sources of this information will be:

Dictionary sourcing

A corrections and updates mechanism will be provided. William Whitaker, the original author, intended to include a lot more words than are presently available:

I will continue to refine the dictionary and the program. The major goal is to complete the inclusion of OLD and L+S, and this may take years. Along the way, and later, I will expand to medieval Latin. I am not so unrealistic as to believe that I will ‘finish’, indeed, this is a hobby and there is no advantage to finishing.

Interfaces

In the future, we shall provide structured output, and a library interface, such that users can access the grammatical information embedded in the programme without scraping it.

Code cleanup

The programme was originally maintained by a single author, its creator, who was one of the creators of the Ada language in which it is written. From the perspective of developers coming to it afresh, it has accumulated a few employee-weeks’ worth of technical debt over the decade and a half it was under development.

To keep the code useful - so it can be compiled, understood, adapted and so on, it needs to be made more readily intelligible. In general, this entails:

Medium-term plan

Martin Keegan, originally written June 2015; substantially updated March 2016