Subject: Re: bug#52331: M-$ doesn't respect subword mode

From: André A. Gomes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2021 17:21:28 +0000

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> However, and the Emacs maintainers will probably agree, the
>> responsibility of sending the "right" word to the ispell sub-process
>> should be on Emacs' side.  I.e., when subword-mode is on, there should
>> be a call to word-at-point before sending it to the spell checker.
>
> It's not that easy, unfortunately.  ispell.el has its own rules for
> what is a word, and the rules aren't static, they are determined
> dynamically by the definition of the dictionary. That's because of at
> least 2 reasons: (1) the rules must match what the dictionary
> considers a word, and (2) spell-checking is expected to work in
> buffers that mix several languages, so the rules need to be sensitive
> to the language of the dictionary and reject "words" whose letters are
> not part of the language.

Correct, my comment was over simplistic.  But I don't see where my
reasoning fails.  I can't think of an example where calling
word-at-point before the ispell rules kick in would make harm.  What am
I missing?

> So perhaps a better approach is to teach subword-mode about the word
> rules of ispell.el, not the other way around.  Patches welcome.

I don't see how this could help.  Care to expand a bit?

--
André A. Gomes
"Free Thought, Free World"