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Development and Rehosting

Program source code and data

The program is written in Ada, and is machine independent. Ada source code is available for compiling onto other machines.

Licence

All parts of the WORDS system, source code and data files, are made freely available to anyone who wishes to use them, for whatever purpose.

Rehosting WORDS

There is an archive of all the Ada source files to port WORDS, and support programs and data to generate the necessary dictionaries and inflections for re-hosting the WORDS Latin dictionary parsing/translation system on any machine with an Ada 95 compiler. (It can be made to work with Ada 83 also by replacing just the short driver routine.)

This a console program (keyboard entry), without fancy Windows GUI, and has thereby been made system independent.

There are four supporting programs

and DOS ASCII data files for them to act upon to produce WORDS data files

and other WORDS DOS ASCII supporting files

The wordy file names are for compliance with the restrictions of the GNAT system.

The system produces executables for WORDS, MAKEDICT, MAKESTEM, MAKEEFIL, and MAKEINFL. Executing the latter four against the input respectively of

(when they ask for DICTIONARY say G) producing

Along with ADDONS.LAT and UNIQUES.LAT, this is the set of data for WORDS.

The only problem that has appeared on porting so far is that one must be careful of file names. Problems sometimes turn up but have been easily rectified by inspection. All of my systems are case-independent on file names. If one is running in a case-dependent system (UNIX), this is a point to check. Note that the data files are capitalized, source files are not.

The source is in Ada and therefore very readable, which is not claimed for the logic which is my, not Ada’s, fault. The source and data are freely available for anyone to use for any purpose. It may be converted to other languages, used in pieces, or modified in any way without further permission or notification.

There is one oddity that the reader may remark upon. The code is loaded with PUT/print statements which are now commented out. These were used at some time for debug purposes and were just left in. They (mostly) are left justified and may fairly easily be removed for a cleaner presentation. Further there are many blocks of code which during development have been moved or removed, but have in their previous place been left commented. This is also messy. I cannot really justify not having fixed this, but there it is.

Feedback

Feedback is invited. If there is a problem in installing or operating, in the results or their display, or if your favorite word is omitted from the dictionary, please let us know.

All comments are appreciated. Check back for new version releases.