From: Ian Macdonald <ian@...>
Date: 2002-05-24T19:35:32+09:00
Subject: [ANN] Ruby/DICT 0.9.0

Hi,

This is to announce Ruby/DICT.

Ruby/DICT is an RFC 2229 compliant client-side library implementation
of the DICT protocol. It can be used to write clients that access
dictionary definitions from a set of natural language dictionary
databases.

In the words of the RFC:

   The DICT protocol is designed to provide access to multiple
   databases.  Word definitions can be requested, the word index can
   be searched (using an easily extended set of algorithms),
   information about the server can be provided (e.g., which index
   search strategies are supported, or which databases are available),
   and information about a database can be provided (e.g., copyright,
   citation, or distribution information).  Further, the DICT protocol
   has hooks that can be used to restrict access to some or all of the
   databases.

In addition, rdict, a command-line based dictionary client built on
Ruby/DICT, is included in the archive.

For more information, please see:

    http://www.caliban.org/ruby/

Although this is the first public release of Ruby/DICT, the
implementation is fairly complete, so I'm optimistically setting the
version at 0.9.0. I expect only minor updates to the code as it heads
toward its 1.0.0 release.

Please send me e-mail concerning bugs, code improvements, suggestions
for features, etc.

Ian
-- 
Ian Macdonald               | I had to hit him -- he was starting to make
ian@caliban.org             | sense. 
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