Context-sensitive spellchecking for programming languages

Researchers at Arizona State University have developed a text editor that provides special support tools for people who write computer programs in various programming languages. This editor, known as the E editor, has evolved over a number of years and includes many unique features that greatly facilitate the editing of program source files. The latest addition to the E editor is a contextsensitive spellchecker that automatically distinguishes between code and comments in a source program for nearly any programming language. The editor’s context-sensitive spellchecker checks only the comments in a program while ignoring the code, so the programmer doesn’t receive needless and distracting notifications of misspelled “words” that are just variable names or other tokens in the code. The spellchecker also has options that help it ignore variable names and mnemonics even when they appear in the comments.