A Primitive Spellchecker in Microsoft C++ 6.0

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Introduction

It's quite common knowledge that you can specify your own keywords for the syntax color highlighting of the Microsoft C++ environment. The idea of this article is to make excessive use of this feature to achieve the effect of a simple and free spellchecking tool. All the common things will be displayed in a special color if they're written correctly.

For this, all the common things that are used when programming are put into the file usertype.dat which contains all user-defined keywords. The challenge is to get an (almost) complete list of all data types, classes, member functions and defines that are commonly used. Since this is quite a lot of work, you should start with the file enclosed in this article. It contains more that 2000 words, giving you a good start. Depending on the things you work on, you'll probably add your own things sooner or later.

Using the Code

Just unzip the file and place it in the subdirectory \Common\MSDev98\Bin of your Microsoft C++ installation. You'll have to restart the IDE and may want to configure the color used for user-defined keywords in the IDE's options.

Points of Interest

Currently, I have more than 2000 keywords in the file and it works nicely. I've expected to encounter some kind of limit, but so far it works nicely.

History

• 21^st April, 2003: Initial post

I'm always adding new keywords when I encounter them. You can download the latest version on my homepage. You can find some other tricks and tools there, too.