Subject: Suggestions

From: Jim Davis <jrd>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 87 21:15:24 EST

Please add these to the list of suggestions for the DICTIONARY server.
(Maintained by G Cathey.)

1) access based on pronunciation.  I send it a pronunciation string
and it sends me back a list of all words that are pronounced that way,
in the same manner that wild cards do.  This would be valuable for
the phonetic dictionary.

2) Same as 1, but allows me to (somehow) specify a phonetic similarity
predicate, a function of two pronunciations.  This would, for example, allow
me to specify that all vowels are to be considered alike.  This would
be very helpful for the PD, even if the only option available were
to ignore vowel differences.

3) At present, if I use wild cards (on the Vax Unix client), I get back a
numbered list of possibilities, and I can then type in a number to get
that definition.  But I can only do this once.  It would be nice to
be able to do this many times.  This is not very important.  I do not
know whether this limitation is in the Client or the Server.

4) Wildcards at the beginning of a word are very slow.  It would be nice
to speed this up.  It is not very important.