Programmer's Language-Aware Spell Checker?

Jerry Asher writes "Not all of my coworkers are careful about spelling errors. Sometimes this causes real embarrassment as spelling errors creep into software interfaces. Does anyone know of spell checkers for programming languages? I don't want a text spell checker, I want a programming-language-aware spell checker. A spell checker that I can pass all of my code through and will flag spelling errors in function names, variable names, and comments, but will ignore language keywords, language constructs and expressions, and various programming styles (camel code, or underscores, or...). I want a spell checker that knows that void *functionSigniture(char *myRoutine) contains one spelling error. Does anyone have such a thing for Java or C++? Are there any Eclipse plugins that do this?"

Eclipse WTP 3.3 Europa seems to do this.. almost.

The version of Eclipse I run, Eclipse WTP 3.3, does spell checking on comments as standard. Not for variable, function names and the like though. It's a decent first attempt though. In truth, I turned it off within the first few hours. It underlines any mistakes in red which I find really annoying when scanning code as I keep thinking I've seen syntax errors. More often than not my eyes are drawn to a spelling mistake, which in many cases isn't even really a mistake, which distracts me from what I'm actually trying to look at.

Man Dies Waiting for Eclipse to Launch

Man Dies Waiting for Eclipse to Launch

A software engineer in San Jose, CA was found dead at his desk yesterday, apparently having died while waiting for his Java editing program, Eclipse, to finish its boot process. Coworkers say the engineer came in that morning vowing to "get Eclipse working on his box or die trying." The last thing anyone heard him say aloud was the cryptic comment: "I see the splash screen is appropriately blue." Nobody knows what he meant. The man was then thought to have fallen asleep, but hours later it was discovered that the engineer had died suddenly of apparent natural causes. The forensics team's investigation that evening was reportedly interrupted unexpectedly when the dead man's Eclipse program suddenly finished launching. The team tried to interact with it to see if they could find clues about the man's death, but the program was unresponsive and the machine ultimately had to be rebooted. At this time, the police commissioner says there is no evidence of foul play, and they currently believe the man simply died of either boredom or frustration.

Re:Man Dies Waiting for Eclipse to Launch

Credit where credit is due -- this is an excerpt from Stevey's Tech News, Issue #1 [blogspot.com].

Re:Man Dies Waiting for Eclipse to Launch

Here's one way to ensure an Eclipse launch takes enough time for you to go grocery shopping:

Work in a windows environment in Virginia. Access the Eclipse workspace directory through a mounted drive pointing to your home directory on a UNIX box in Montana. On the UNIX machine, your home directory is actually mounted on a Windows box back in Virginia.

God help you if you have the "compile on save" option enabled. And don't even THINK of rebuilding the workspace.

And yes, I know this from experience.

Re:Eclipse WTP 3.3 Europa seems to do this.. almos

Also plenty of spellcheckers will ignore one or two letter words.

So if you use fortran, you're screwed? No change there, then ...

ego != good_open_minded_programmer

"Any douche who doesn't realise a misspelt function name will fail to compile clearly hasn't written any code yet."

You clearly fail to see a programmer can also create their own function names, as well as use other peoples functions. So you prove you are a very inexperienced programmer, (and close minded), which adds weight to the idea you are either young or just arrogant. Also your very apparent need to show hostility, shows a degree of insecurity, where you are over compensating, by verbally hitting out at others, in an attempt to appear to be more knowledgeable than you really are.

The easiest way to become a better programmer, is to be more open minded. So far you have failed to demonstrate this.

As a side note, (back in the DOS days of programming), I found the the spell checker in Multiedit very useful (especially when having to work very late at night, after the coffee stopped working! ;)

Re:ego != good_open_minded_programmer

From the GP's website when view without Flash:
We're the do-anything team that specialises in imaginging new ways for you to reach your audience.

The word "pwned" doesn't spell check correctly either, but it is applicable.

Re:What the fuck is the OP on?

It's in the third word. You missed a letter.

Re:Eclipse WTP 3.3 Europa seems to do this.. almos

His next project is to have a handy little helper with a RAM chip avatar. His name is chippy and he comes out with helpful phrases like:

"You appear to be creating an infinite loop. Would you like me to increment your counter variable?"

"You appear to be writing a virus, would you like a list of the latest Windows Vista sploits?"

Visual Assist

Visual Assist for Visual Studio does this.

Next silly question, please.

Re:Visual Assist

Please don't use the names of the tools the beast of Redmond uses to stupify the world. This is /. after all, if you have to code on/for windos, then please be humble and shy about it.

Re:Visual Assist

Yes. You must not speak of the-one-who-rhymes-with-masturbates, or he will cast an unforgivable curse on your machine: puteulanus fenestra mortalis!

How about eyeball Mk 1?

Some people call using it a "code review". If you are really serious about it, post the code to /. - plenty of people here seem to have time to point out any spelling errors.

Re:How about eyeball Mk 1?

Um, let me introduce you to the famous spelling mistake: HTTP Referer [wikipedia.org]. How about we let computers and people each do what they're good at. Computers are good at comparing strings in a spell checker, and people are good at producing typos, spelling mistakes, and approving fixes. Discipline isn't the solution, better tools are. (I bet there's a spelling mistake in here -- which proves my point that Opera needs a spell check like Firefox!)

Re:How about eyeball Mk 1?

I bet there's a spelling mistake in here

That's a good bet in a post explicitly pointing out a famous spelling mistake :)

Re:How about eyeball Mk 1?

You're aware of the concept that a bug is cheaper to fix the earlier you spot it? If it's flagged up as soon as it happens I have to rename that one variable in one place, and I can do it at virtually no cost. If it's flagged up after I've finished the work and committed it for review, then I'll need to change it across multiple files (sure, an IDE will do refactorings like that in most cases, but there can be side effects) and recommit. That's a far greater expense.

Re:May I suggest....

if you want your code to read like english, you consider a language like COBOL? Not that it would help you with spell checking, per se...

Responses like this entirely miss the point of the question. Same with the "just review your code" responses. It's not a matter of making the language more readable. It's a matter of making the code more usable. Certainly, correct spelling is pointless without other elements of good code practice. However, bad spelling can add a lot of frustration.

I joined a project which already had a few misspelled class names. I'm a fast typer and often I've typed out more of a filename than is spelled correctly before hitting tab to complete the name. Needless to say, I've been trained to hit tab earlier for a few choice files. But it's certainly been an irritation. Similarly, I've been confounded more than once when a function or variable couldn't be found by the compiler, only to realize that I'd spelled a word correctly rather than how the actual name was spelled.

We choose to use English words for our class, function, and variable names for a reason. That reason is mostly defeated by misspelling the English word. A dictionary is a great idea, even for coding languages that don't "read like English".

Re:May I suggest....

Also people tend to miss that our brains are very good at correcting spelling mistakes as we read, doing code review trying to catch spelling mistakes can be very tough.

Re:May I suggest....

It strikes me that the problem is that most spell checkers try to check everything, and that a lot of code has things that really shouldn't be spell checked at all, mixed with things that should. I imagine that one way to start would be to only alert on those errors that are almost correct -- if it looks like garbage, ignore it, but if it's close, assume it should be right. Perhaps ignore prefixes / suffixes as well -- pSomething is fine, pSometihng isn't. Also, CamelCase ought to be easy enough to detect -- treat it as word boundaries, and spell check the individual words. Again, egregious misspellings probably aren't -- nextObjFoo is ok, even though Obj isn't a word -- it's so far from being a word that we assume the programmer meant it that way.

Similarly, there should probably be a set of words added that aren't "English" but are used often enough to be worth adding to the dictionary. Things like Obj, Int, and Ptr.

I think the reason such spell checkers don't exist already is fairly simple -- everyone just assumes they're impossible, and doesn't try. Couple that with the fact that a mediocre quality one would be so annoying as to be worse than useless, and you have a recipe for a program that won't get written. I don't think either of those would have to be the case if someone sufficiently clever decided to attack the problem, though.

Sounds like a good idea

And not too hard to implement - all you need is a lexer and a few functions to classify different naming styles. lexertl [benhanson.net] even comes ready with a full example for C++, so get to it ;)

vim 7.0 anyone?

I particularly like the spelling feature in new vim, right-click menu (:set mousemodel=popup) to select a corrected word or remember current word as correct. Perhaps writing a vim plugin as you explain could be possible? I'd be very glad to use it too ;)

It's a good question ...

We've got code here that refers to 'insurrances', 'insurances', 'insurrences' and 'insurences', I'm not kidding.

People here making fun of his request and saying that this should be set in stone in design documents, or be checked in peer code reviews are obviously not working in a run-of-the-mill software company where there's neither the inclination nor the time to do everything the formal way. Also, I have to see the first design document that correctly enumerates all the requirements for the software, let alone all the names for the variables to be used.

Re:It's a good question ...

As a non-native English speaker, working in a non-native english speaking team (mainly french speaking people) it is a real problem. The biggest problem happens when you search something and don't find it because you wrote it right and your coworker wrote it wrong. (Or the inverse, I don't claim to be perfect in English)

Sure, you might say, "Write your code in French", but that's not a solution. My mother tongue is Dutch, we have a German coworker, and you never know if the next guy will be Italian. There is also this team that has to maintain code written by Spanish people.... in Spanish.... and they don't know Spanish. Fun times, if you like to hear them curse....

In multilingual environments this problem increases drastically.

TextMate does some...

TextMate on OS X has spell checking functionality that is semi-useful, but it's not really "aggressive" enough, and there doesn't seem to be a way to make it such with prefs/configuration.

You can right-click on any "word" (variable name, subroutine name, whatever, just generally a whitespace-delimited group of characters) and it will check the spelling and present alternatives in the context menu. It also recognizes things like perl's sigils so correcting '$teh' turns into '$the', not 'the'.

It _won't_ automatically check spelling except in strings (so e.g. if I have '$teh = "This is a tset.";', 'tset' will be underlined, '$teh' won't). It doesn't include comments in its automatic checking either, which is probably the most annoying part about it.

Overall I typically just don't bother with it, but someone _has_ thought along these lines, at least.

Re:Syntax Highlighting

The question wasn't about user interface strings. It was about spelling in APIs. e.g. One issue at my last company, which was British, is that they standardized on US spelling, but some British spellings crept in too. So sometimes you'd get a function containing "Initialize" and sometimes "Initialise".

aspell?

I remember from spellchecking some html documents a while back ago that aspell is at least aware of html. I do not know how well it works with other kinds of documents.

Re:the problem is really prevalent

I have seen large portions of source code, much of it commercial, containing not one or two but hundreds of spelling mistakes.

Man, I was digging around in some SAP code recently and none of it made sense. Half of it didn't even look like English!

How about this

Yes, this is a legitimate problem. I work on code that has spelling mistakes embedded into interfaces and it's very annoying. The fashionable use of StudlyCaps in programming (why? who decided that TextLikeThis is more readable than text_like_this?) makes the job a little harder but not impossible, as long as you follow the sane rule of making each word start with capital and continue lowercase, even if an acronym (so XmlParser not XMLParser or, God forbid, XMLparser - though of course XML_parser would be better than any of those).

Enough rant. How about this:

perl -ne "s/([a-z])([A-Z])/$1 $2/g; tr/A-Za-z/ /c; foreach (split) { print qq{$_\n} unless $seen{lc $_}++ }" source_file...

That will give a list of unique words in your source code (use find and xargs to scan the whole source tree). Then you can run that list of words through an ordinary spellchecker such as ispell. Unfortunately when you find a mistake you have to go back and grep for it to find where it occurs. You would also need a personal dictionary for things that are not English words but nonetheless appear in code.

I would probably keep the private word list containing things like 'foreach' and 'const' with the program source code, and have a makefile target 'make spellcheck' that runs a command like the above and then prints out all words found that are not in /usr/share/dict/words or in the private word list. Indeed, why not this:

find . -type f -name '*.c' | xargs perl -ne "s/([a-z])([A-Z])/$1 $2/g; tr/A-Za-z/ /c; foreach (split) { print qq{$_\n} unless $seen{lc $_}++ }" >found_words
sort -u private_word_list /usr/share/dict/words >allowed_words
diff -u allowed_words found_words | grep -E '^[+][^+]'

The private word list can be kept under version control and checked in whenever you add a new non-English word like 'Frobule' to your source code.

Adding filenames and line numbers to the output is left as an exercise for the reader. You might also want to change the perl command to ignore words with length < 5.

FxCop

For .net languages, FxCop does some of this checking, even understanding camel casing and underscores in tokens. And a bunch more, since it is a static code analysis tool.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Team/FxCop/ [gotdotnet.com]

Visual Assist

Doesn't Visual Assist from Whole Tomato do this? I've used it in the past and I'm sure spelling mistakes (and a whole host of other things) were pointed out.

I'm not associated with Whole Tomato, but if anyone from WT sees this, can I have a free subscription :-)

Annoying perhaps but

True, identifier names containing spelling errors can be a real annoyance, but I somehow doubt you'll ever find a usable solution, at least not as long as you'll need to interface to code beyond your control. What spell checker wouldn't choke on regular C++? Just picking a random declaration from MSDN (feel free to choose any other API, it won't change anything):

HRESULT MFGetService(
IUnknown* punkObject,
REFGUID guidService,
REFIID riid,
LPVOID* ppvObject
);

You'll probably just end up spending all your day removing false positives.

Ken Thompson and creat()

Wow, 240 comments about spelling and programming and no-one's mentioned the famous Ken Thompson quote:

"If I had to do it over again? Hmm... I guess I'd spell 'creat' with an 'e'."

Emacs - ispell-check-comments

Still a great IDE after all these years...

I'm sorry...

If you are too damn lazy or too stupid to type your language properly, then you shouldn't be a programmer. Become an insurance adjuster or something less demanding.

I don't think I'd like to hire someone who can't spell. It shows volumes about you.

Intelligence starts with a keen understanding and application of your language.

if you simply must have it, editplus has syntax highlighting and offers spellchecking dictionaries.

English (or $YOUR_LANGUAGE_HERE)

Yep. Programmers should know how to spell correctly in their native language. But hey, all through school those technonerds where likely the same ones who never missed a chance to whine about how they hated their English (or whatever) classes and thought that learning grammar and spelling were a waste of time when they could be doing cool geek stuff. The rise 1337-speak and txtspeak hasn't helped.

At least in the real writing business there are editors trained and paid to catch these errors.

Being unable to spell correctly makes you look really stupid to most people.

Just FYI, if you have a decent programming environment, it should at least flag cases where you've mistyped an existing identifier. If there's an ImmediateFlag in your code, you'd get a warning if you typed ImediateFlag or ImmediateFalg or whatever. Not much help when the programmer is creating new identifiers, of course. Although I've seen cases where the programmer in question for whatever reason decided that because ImediateFlag was undefined then they would just define it, even though ImmediateFlag existed and was what they meant. That ought to get you fired in my book.

Hey by the way, pair programming is a great way to have continuous code reviews and a check on some of the more typical fumble-finger errors.

Re:How about the Built-in OS X spell checker?

How about the Built-in OS X spell checker?

We're talking about programming, friend.

Re:simple

It's not so simple when you're not the one writing the code, but have to deal with the results. There's an SDK that I use as a part of my job, developed by our head office in Japan - it's a set of C# classes, and nothing annoys me more than typing "Connection foo = new Connection();", then noticing Visual Studio isn't highlighting it as I'd expect. Hunting around for anywhere up to a minute and eventually finding out it is actually "Conectin" instead of "Connection". If there were a good "programmers spellchecker", I may not need to use it myself, but I could give it to my Japanese colleagues to make MY life easier! (note: the above example is fictitious, but is an illustration of the type of error that I deal with that this would prevent)