bug#20741: 24.4; flyspell doesn't work with abbreviations ending in a period

[Reuben Thomas]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2022 at 16:42, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> From: Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
>
> I think we can distinguish 3 different problems here:
>
> 1. Natural language spellchecking. That's what this issue is about.
> 2. Spell-checking code. (Essentially, identifiers.)
> 3. Finding code inside natural language, and checking it as if it were code. (That's what you're talking about
> here.) This is not a spellchecking problem, it's a problem of identifying which spell-checking apparatus to
> use, rather like font-lock for multi-language buffers. It's hard to see how to do it without some syntactic clue
> (e.g. the use of backticks in markdown), as used in multi-language buffers for font-locking.

Anyway: what are the practical proposals for improving this?  Are we
going to handle only periods, or does anyone have a more general
solution?

Emacs does not currently try to handle case 3, as far as I know. That would be a medium-sized project in its own right.

Case 2 depends on per-programming-language syntax tables, not on the spellchecker. I don't know what the current arrangements for this are.

Case 1, on which everything else depends, is a matter of Emacs sending stretches of text to the spell-checker, which currently (at least with Hunspell) does not deal with punctuation very well, though there are plans to improve Hunspell, according to the issue I linked to earlier.

None of these would benefit from special-casing treatment of the period or any other character in ispell.el, I think.

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