Editing Code completion (section)

==History==
Research on intelligent code completion began in 1957, with spelling checkers for [[bitmap]] images of [[cursive writing]] and special applications to find records in databases despite incorrect entries. In 1961, [[Les Earnest]], who headed the research on this budding technology, saw it necessary to include the first spell checker that accessed a list of 10,000 acceptable words.<ref>{{cite web|last=Earnest|first=Les|title=The First Three Spelling Checkers|url=http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/spelling.pdf|publisher=Stanford University|access-date=10 October 2011|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121022091418/http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/spelling.pdf|archive-date=22 October 2012|df=dmy-all}}</ref> Ralph Gorin, a graduate student under Earnest at the time, created the first true spell-check program written as an application (rather than research) for general English text. SPELL, for the DEC PDP-10 at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), was published in February 1971.<ref>{{cite book | last1 = Peterson | first1 = James | title = Computer Programs for Detecting and Correcting Spelling Errors | date = December 1980 | url = http://simson.net/ref/2006/csci_e-180/ref/spelling-p676-peterson.pdf | access-date = 2011-02-18}}</ref> Gorin wrote the program in [[assembly language|assembly]] for faster action; he made it by searching a word list for plausible correct spellings that differ by a single letter or adjacent-letter transpositions, and presenting them to the user. Gorin made SPELL publicly accessible, as was done with most SAIL programs, and it soon spread around the world via the then-new [[ARPANET]], about a decade before personal computers came into general use.<ref>{{cite book | last1 = Earnest | first1 = Les | title = Visible Legacies for Y3K | url = https://stanford.edu/~learnest/legacies.pdf | access-date = 2011-02-18 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110720044806/http://stanford.edu/~learnest/legacies.pdf | archive-date = 20 July 2011 | url-status = dead }}</ref> SPELL and its algorithms and data structures inspired the [[Unix]] program [[Ispell]].