EDICT and edict.el

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Hi y'all.

I wrote to Jim Breen, who has taken a real beating from us TLUG'ers
lately but is still nice and polite, and he says

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Breen <jwb@example.com> writes:

    >>> Is there a more recent version [of edict.el]?  If so, where
    >>> may I find it? 

    Jim> Good luck. I haven't heard from the authors for years now.

Too bad.  It's a fascinating bit of code; too bad it doesn't work.

    Jim> If you are/have access to a emacs/mule expert, it would be a
    Jim> service to humanity to try and convert the .el to the more
    Jim> modern script.

I'm not an expert by any means, but I've already gotten it through the
byte-compiler by the simple expedient of removing statements the
byte-compiler didn't like. :-)  I have edict.el running now, but
edict.elc doesn't work.  Given the way I got the library to load
(removing code), I suspect the functionality is not all there.  It
does find the words "translation" and 「漢字」 at least....

O-negai-aru-yo Department: if you want to hack some Emacs-Lisp, write
<A HREF="mailto:turnbull@example.com">me directly</A> and I will
send you the code that loads.  Once I have gotten the code beaten more
or less into shape (ie, I understand what I did when I surgically
removed code) and have an installation script (or at least somewhat
intelligible instructions) I will make a ALPHA (if I don't understand
whether it should work or not) or BETA (if I understand the code and
believe it should work) test version of my rewrites available.

The problem with all of these (except the xjdic program) is that I
would like to avoid having EDICT plus ENAMDICT in memory all the time.
I looked at converting EDICT to a sort of escape-less JIS, using say
"<>" as JIS-in/JIS-out codes, and interfacing to the glimpse text
indexing system (a wonderful tool for managing your personal
directory, see http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu:1994/), but it is heavily
dependent on English-oriented heuristics.

O-negai-aru-yo Department: You wouldn't happen to know if anybody's
done any work on i18n-ization of glimpse, would you?

Best regards,
Steve

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