Eli Zaretskii [2014-06-20 17:04:37 +03:00] wrote:

>> If any spell-checker is enabled by default it should also actually
>> work with all/most human languages and the way users expect.
>> Otherwise it gets in the way. There are languages which can't be
>> spell-checked with ispell-like programs
>
> Which languages are those?  Do you mean Finnish, or do you mean
> something else?

I mean that Ispell-like programs can't be used either because a
dictionary for a language doesn't exist (a lot of languages) or
can't/doesn't provide a decent checker for a language (Finnish, at
least).

> How do you see that ispell.el is specific to "ispell-like programs"?

I'm confused. From where I see it ispell.el is about ispell-like
interface all over the place.

> I always thought Hunspell should support Finnish, since it was written
> to support Hungarian. What am I missing?

In theory Hunspell probably could but it doesn't. Finnish people use
Voikko which is a shared library that provides spell-checker,
hyphenation, syntax checker, morphological analyze. It's the Finnish
high-quality language technology which everybody in the free software
world uses.

Enchant spelling checker library can use Voikko as a back-end. Enchant
even provides a simple ispell-like command-line tool which has ispell
switches "-d", "-a" and "-l". Didn't manage to get it working with Emacs
ispell/flyspell.

But my ultimate point is not me or Finnish. Spell-checking task depends
on so many things outside the scope of Emacs project. So many different
languages, different checker engines, missing dictionaries, missing
engines. In many situations automatically enabled flyspell-mode just
wouldn't work. I think it's a bad idea to turn on such feature by
default.