Recognizing abbreviated commands using `tries'

[Roy Mongiovi]

This doesn't use tries, but I did approximately the same thing in a
text editor I wrote many years ago.  I kept a sorted table of all the
keywords I wanted to recognize.  To search the table, I did a binary
search basically using "strncmp(keyword, table[i], strlen(keyword))".
If I didn't find a match, I knew the keyword wasn't in the table.
Otherwise I probed linearly backwards and forwards in the table
looking for other matches.  If there weren't any the keyword is a
unique abbreviation, otherwise it's ambiguous.  I also augmented
this to look for an exact match (strlen(keyword) == strlen(table[i]))
which allowed me to enter very short (i.e. single character) entries
in the table as a shorthand for certain frequently used commands.

It worked really well, it was relatively fast, and it's simple.
What more can you ask for?
-- 
Roy J. Mongiovi     Systems Support Specialist     Office of Computing Services
Georgia Institute of Technology	  Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0275   (404) 894-4660
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