Comment by eichin
1 year ago
For perspective, in 1983 or so, Grammatik on CP/M ran in under 64k and did "grammar checking" (spell checking, plus a bunch of expert system rules) on an 8-bit system. (It sticks in my memory because of the time spent poking at the really interesting part: that it was so compact because it was in Forth, and there was enough of an outer interpreter in the product that with a little hex editing you could just use it as a Forth interpreter - with a very specialized set of functions preloaded :-)
The Wordstar editor I run on my own CP/M system, with 64k of RAM, contains the 2023-byte long "SPELL.COM" spell-checker.
I've not decompiled it to see how it works, but it's small and fast, and works well.
You have to count the size of the dictionary too. See "DICT.DIC".
https://dflund.se/~pi/cpm/files/ftp.mayn.de/pub/cpm/archive/...