Re: Changing dictionary while flyspell-buffer is running

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Titus von der Malsburg <address@hidden>
> Cc: Joost Kremers <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden
> Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2019 22:19:53 +0100
> 
> > It needs at least 30 letters to guess right, which is quite a few.
> 
> The number of letters depends on the configured languages, it could be
> less than 30 when the scripts are different but for English, Dutch,
> and German 30 works well in my experience and languages don’t get much
> more similar than that (except if you want to distinguish between US
> English and UK English).

The minimum number also depends on the expected reliability of
language detection, of course.

> I just tried it and noticed one downside: Flyspell offers possible
> corrections for unknown words and when multiple languages are
> configured, these suggestions come from all configured dictionaries.

Of course, but what would you expect?  And how is that a downside?
Hunspell doesn't try to guess the language at all, it just looks in
all loaded dictionaries one by one.

> Many of them are of course not relevant because they are not in the
> language of the paragraph.

There's no "language of the paragraph" in this method, you can freely
mix words from different languages in the same paragraph.  There are
important use cases for that, like editing a message translation
catalog or text that that explains in-line the meaning of words in
another language.

> Flyspell also has an autocorrection feature (which I’m not using)
> and this feature would also largely stop being useful with multiple
> dictionaries.

It will only become less useful if the first correction is off in a
significant number of cases.  Which is not at all expected, certainly
not when each language uses a different script.

> I think that this makes the Hunspell solution less appealing.

I think you are slightly biased ;-).  As am I, most probably.  Both
solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, and the user should
choose which one better suits his/her needs in each case.

I mentioned Hunspell because I think few people even know about this
feature, which is quite unique among spellers supported by Emacs.