[aspell] Crossplatform coding..

[Matthew Allen]

To the people working on Aspell,

I'm working on a cross platform mail client (BeOS/Linux/Win32) and I thought 
I'd dive into the Aspell code and produce a version that compiles with VC++ 6 
on Win32.

Now I've found that due to coding solely for gcc, certain compiler specific 
things have crept into the code base. I would like to replace these compiler 
specific things with code that compiles on both GCC and VC++. Thats if people 
don't mind too much.

Some examples of what I mean:

adding:
        using namespace std;
to the namespace declarations where needed to access string an o/istream etc.

from:
        static int len = 256;
        char buffer[len]; // this isn't standard C++ is it?
to:
        #define BUFFER_LEN 256
        char buffer[BUFFER_LEN]; // or something similar
or even:
        int len;
        char *buffer;
        ...
        len=256;
        buffer = new char[len];

from:
        class a {
                virtual a *func() = 0;
        };
        class a_impl {
                a_impl *func() { return this; }
        };
to:
        class a {
                virtual a *func() = 0;
        };
        class a_impl {
                a *func() { return this; }
        };
        
and other changes as required (and I remember).

What do you guys think?

also on a side note...
it would be nice for the source code to have the same file extensions as other 
compilers, eg .cpp for source and .h for headers. I know gcc supports this just 
as well as .cc and .hh so it's not like it's going to screw up anything in 
unix, it's just better for other compilers.

one last thing:
I found the header in pspell: string_list.h has:

#ifndef PSPELL_STRING_MAP__H
#define PSPELL_STRING_MAP__H

at the top to prevent multiple compilation... why is it "PSPELL_STRING_MAP__H" 
which is the same as string_map.h?? This causes compile problems.

It should be changed to PSPELL_STRING_LIST__H to make things clear.



Thanks for listening.
--
Matthew Allen
(http://www.ozemail.com.au/~fret)
"Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with every Micro$oft product"