An Object Pascal codegenerator for Snowball

Links to resources

Snowball main page

The contributed zip file

 Dear Mr. Porter,

 Somebody extended Snowball for me to create Pascal stemmers. I wanted the
 stemming algorithms in Pascal so they can be compiled in my information
 retrieval system (http://www.collectionconnection.nl) which is created in
 Delphi. I would not mind sharing the extensions, especially given the nature
 of the Snowball project. If you are interested, please let me know, and I
 will send you the sources. Everything seems to be working fine, but
 unfortunately I won't be able to maintain the Pascal-extension code when the
 core Snowball program changes since my knowledge of C is approximately zero.
 Here are the changes the developer made:

 "In order to support Delphi files generation I've added file
 generator_delphi.c (in compiler directory). Also modified:
 1) header.h: added output_delphi and make_delphi fields to struct options.
 Also added forward declarations to Delphi's generator functions;
 2) driver.c: modified in order to support new command line option "-d" and
 call Delphi generator if its specified;

 Modified GNUmakefile at the root of the snowball tree in order to add
 generator_delphi.c into the compilation process.

 Folder Delphi added. It contains 3 files:
 1) SnowballProgram.pas - base class for all generated stemmers;
 2) Test.bpr - template for the sample projects;
 3) Generate.pl - Perl script that generate all sample stemmers.

 File algorithms/finnish/stem.sbl modified. There was two grouping: v and V. I
 rename V to V2 because Delphi Language is case-insensitive."

 I appologize for emailing you directly, but offering the source code on the
 mailing list could result in parallel versions instead of a single CVS
 version and I didn't think that would be good either.

 Best regards,
 Wout van Wezel

 Wout,

 Thank you for this email. I am very busy with a number of other things at the
 moment, but hope to send you a sensible reply in a few days. Meanwhile I'm
 copying your email to Richard Boulton, who is equally involved with the
 Snowball work.

 Martin

 Wout,

 I think it would be a shame to lose the work you have done, but at the moment
 I'm not sure about the best way to make it publicly available from the Snowball
 site. I will talk the matter over with Richard Boulton. Could I suggest that,
 despite your misgivings, it should be announced on Snowball discuss? We then
 get a record on the site that Pascal versions of the stemmers do exist.

 Maintenance is of course the main issue here. On
 http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer I have about 14 versions of the
 Porter stemmer in various languages, only four of which I wrote myself.
 Inevitably I get queries about versions of the stemmer written in programming
 languages I am not familiar with, and they are difficult to answer, especially
 when contact with the author has been lost.

 We would need to assess the code. For example,

 >File algorithms/finnish/stem.sbl modified. There was two grouping: v and V. I
 >rename V to V2 because Delphi Language is case-insensitive."

 This is not a good solution, since it constrains the writing of Snowball
 scripts. The name translation should reflect case. There are various ways of
 doing this, for example,

 stemmer -> stemmer_lllllll
 Stemmer -> stemmer_ullllll
 STEMMER -> stemmer_uuuuuuu

 where the pattern of u's an l's shows the upper/lower case usage of the
 original name.

 Martin