Subject: Re: [lojban] Group Document Editing?

From: Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 12:50:53 -0600 (MDT)

On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 02:00:17PM +1200, Chris Double wrote:
> > Also useful would be some sort of programmatic inferface to it, like
> > XML-RPC [1], so other programmers could interface to the dictionary
> > from their programs (for word lookup, etc).
> >
> > [1] http://www.xmlrpc.com
>
> I will _not_ run RPC in my machine. I get enough hack attempts as it
> is.

A better solution would be the DICT protocol[1]. (Covered, as that web
page will tell you, in RFC2229.) There is already software out there under
more or less free licenses which authors could use to access the database.
There is also a libdict[2] out there, which happens to be nearly as free
as you can get short of public domain. Nice pure C, too. (There is
Net::Dict for Perl, etc, etc.)

> My prefered format for the source is TexInfo, which will be converted
> into whatever formats people want and stuck on my web site on a daily
> basis.

TeXinfo isn't terribly manipulable, IMO, but easy enough to output, I
should think.

Really, I'm thinking SQL or something for a backend, since I'd like to
maintain a log of changes to the word and stuff. (The current gismu, cmavo
and lujvo lists are holding something on the order of 6000 words. With
that many entries, the O(n) search time of a flat file becomes sort of
distasteful, and a database's sub O(n) looks much nicer.)

> > Does this sound useful and appropriate? Would people make use of both
> > sides of it, in multiple languages? It seems like implementation would be
> > a Simple Matter Of Programming.
>
> You offering to write it? 8)

If I see evidence that people will contribute and use it, yes.

(Evidence that some other people would look over incoming submissions and
such would be nice, too.)

[1] http://www.dict.org/
[2] http://www.well.com/~sdyoung/libdict-0.2-pre.tar.gz

- Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
If at first you don't succeed,
Increase the amperage.