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Programmer's Language-Aware Spell Checker?

Posted by kdawson on from the hands-off-my-camelcase dept.

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?"

4 of 452 comments (clear)

  1. Eclipse WTP 3.3 Europa seems to do this.. almost. by pringlis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:It's a good question ... by Corporate+Troll · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. FxCop by Koyaanisqatsi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

  4. Re:Man Dies Waiting for Eclipse to Launch by ravenlock · · Score: 5, Informative

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