Word skipping by context

[Kevin Atkinson]

I had an idea on a great general way to determine if a word should be
skipped.  Determine the words to skip based on the symbols that (almost)
always surround the word.

For example when asked to check the following C++ code;
  cout << "My age is: " << num << endl;
  cout << "Next year I will be " << num + 1 << endl;
cout, num, and endl will all be skipped.  "cout" will be skipped because
it is always preceded by a <<.  "num" will be skipped because it is
always preceded by a <<.  And "endl" will be skipped because it is
always between a << and a ;.

Given the following html code.
  
  <table width=50% cellspacing=0 cellpadding=1>
  <tr><td>One<td>Two<td>Three
  <tr><td>1<td>2<td>3
  </table>

  <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=1>
  </table>

table, width cellspacing, cellpadding, tr, td will all be skipped
because they are always inclosed in "<>".  Now of course table and width
would be marked as correct anyway however there is no harm in skipping
them.

So I was wondering if anyone on this list has any experience in writing
this sort of context recognition code or could give me some pointers in
the right direction.

This sort of word skipping will be very powerful if done right.   I
imagine that it could replace specific spell checker modes for Tex,
Nroff, SGML etc because it will automatically be able to figure out
where it should skip words.  It could also probably do a very good job
on programming languages code.

If you are interested in helping be out with this or just have general
comments about the idea please let me know.

Thanks in advance.
-- 
Kevin Atkinson
address@hidden
http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/