R22s

This is the story of trying to fix one problem, in one headword entry in the thesaurus corpus.

Having gotten my 1911 Roget’s out of storage, for use as a backstop in making determinations about errors reported by rlint, I decided it was time to start work. The first entry flagged was:

Copy : tests ✘ : Invalid char '-' in sense 3 (N sense 3) term "transcript",
                 attr "copy into a non-visual form"

The message makes it clear what the technical issue here is: currently, attributes/notations on terms are not allowed to contain hyphens. That might need to change, but for now I’m being very conservative in what characters are allowed to appear where. At this early state I’d rather generate false positives than miss problems.

The Roget22 project is my second-oldest project, yet it hasn’t made it out into the world. Its goal is to produce a beautiful, maintained, electronic thesaurus which is as much a pleasure to peruse as the original.

It got stuck several years ago as a result of me painting myself into a corner with my chosen data representation, and then getting frustrated with the amount of work I had created for myself as a result.