On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 09:18:21PM +0200, Agustin Martin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 04:08:06PM -0400, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:39:12 +0200
> > > From: Agustin Martin <agustin.martin@hispalinux.es>
> > > 
> > > Hi Eli,
> > 
> > Thanks for responding, I was beginning to think that no one is
> > interested.  In general, I find that ispell.el is in sore need of
> > modernization; at least that's my conclusion so far from playing with
> > hunspell (with which I want to replace my aging collection of Ispell
> > and its dictionaries that I use for many years).
> > 
> > > At least for aspell ispell.el already uses utf8 as default communication
> > > encoding and [:alpha:] as CASECHARS (and ^[:alpha:] as NOT-CASECHARS). 
> > > OTHERCHARS is guessed from aspell .dat file for given dictionary.
> > 
> > The question is, why isn't this done for any modern speller.  The only
> > one I know of that cannot handle UTF-8 is Ispell.
> 
> I think the only real remaining reason is for XEmacs compatibility. AFAIK 
> XEmacs does not support [:alpha:].
> 
> I thought about filtering ispell-dictionary-base-alist when used from FSF
> Emacs, so it uses [:alpha:] and still keeps compatibility. I am currently a
> bit busy, but at some time I may try this for Debian and see what happens.

For the records, I am attaching what I am currently trying, post-processing
global dictionary list while leaving local definitions at ~/.emacs
unmodified. This should also deal with [#11200: ispell.el sets incorrect
encoding for the default dictionary]. I would like to test this a bit more
and commit if there are no problems.

-- 
Agustin