Have you ever seen those competitions where you have a phrase, and you haveto make as many words as you can out of it. Well that is what this program isall about.
You enter a phrase, and using Impression's 60,000 word dictionary, it sortsthrough and spits out all the words that can be made up from letters in the phrase.
I cannot guarantee that you will win any competitions using !FindWords, butit should at least provide some amusement. For example: enter your full name as the phrase, and see how many words can be made from it. You will probably be amazed: I got 210 for my name!
GETTING STARTED...
Double-click on the !FindWords icon in a filer window. After a short pause,the icon will appear on the iconbar.
Clicking on the icon brings up the main window. Click on the writeable icon and type in a phrase (Note: the longer the phrase the longer the search will take to complete, but the more words you will get at the end).
If you want the words ending in 'S' seperating, then click on the icon below the phrase (see 'S' ENDINGS for more details).
You can also enter a Key letter. To do this, click on the icon to turn the option on, and enter a CAPITAL letter into the writeable icon. For more details on what this does see KEY LETTER.
If you want you can specify the minimum word length. You can do this by clicking on the icon to turn the option on, then entering the minimum word length into the writeable icon.
Click on GO to start the search. A new window will appear, showing various statistics (see PROCESS WINDOW). Note: The search is mono-tasking, but as I felt a bit guilty about this, you can press Escape at any time and the searchwill be terminated, and you will be able to save any words found so far.
Once the search is complete, the main window will re-appear. You can now save your words (see SAVING).
PROCESS WINDOW...
This window shows the progress of the search. It lists four different pieces of info, which are described below. First you need to know how the program goes through the dictionary.
If you type in the phrase: "AYRTON SENNA", then the program will start off by looking through all the words that begin with the letter 'A', trying to fit them into the phrase. When it reaches the end of the 'A' section, it jumps through the dictionary to words beginning with the letter 'Y'. When it has gone through them, it jumps to words beginning with the letter 'R'.
This carries on so that it goes in the order: A,Y,R,T,O,N,S,E. But when it finishes the 'E' section, the search is complete, because it has already donethe 'N' and 'A' sections before.
Another example is the phrase: "TTTTTTTTTTTT". Although it won't find any words in the dictionary, it will only check the 'T' section once.
Number of words found - This is self-explanatory
Current starting letter - This is the letter of the section it is currently searching. Eg. If 'M' was displayed in this box, then it would be currently searching the 'M' section.
Dict word number - Every word in the dictionary has a number from 0 to 60,000. The number shown here is a rough guide to the words it is currently looking at (This number only increases in steps of 10).
Starting letter pos - This is the position of the current starting letter in the phrase (not counting spaces).
'S' ENDINGS...
I have noticed that most of the time, competitions don't like plurals, abbriviations or names in the answers. In the dictionary there seem to be a few Greek names etc., and there are some abbriviations, eg: DNA, IRA, etc. and these will have to be edited out by hand.
Plurals however, mostly end in the letter 's'. For this reason I have included an option to strip out all the words ending in 's', and keep them seperate from the other words.
To toggle the option on and off, click on the icon below the phrase in the main window.
After the search, you can save two text files. One for the 's' endings, andone for the rest of the words. You will then have to load both files into !Edit, and copy any words that end in 's' and are not plurals across to the main list of words. An example of a word that ends in 's' and is not plural is: 'NEWS'.
SAVING...
Once you have completed a search, you will find that the save option on the
iconbar menu will now be enabled. If you have seperated the 's' endings, thenboth submenus will be enabled.
To save simply ammend the filename, etc. then drag the icon to a filer window. If you have entered a FULL pathname, or you have saved before and youwant to overwrite that file, then you can click on 'OK'.
KEY LETTER...
I have seen some puzzles where you have a 3x3 grid, and each square has a letter in. What you have to do is to make as many words as you can from the letters in the grid, but all the words have to include the letter that is in the centre of the grid.
If you turn the Key letter option on, and enter a letter into the writeable icon, then when a word is found during the search, if it doesn't have the key letter in then it will be ignored.
So if you wanted to use this application to solve the puzzle I have described above, then you would enter the letter in the middle of the grid as the Key letter.
SPECIFICATION + CREDITS...
This application can store 1000 words ending in 's', and 5000 other words.
Interface module by Simon Huntingdon.
Idea from an article in *INFO, BBC Acorn User December '93
