[libvoikko] Proposed interface for hyphenator components

[Harri Pitkänen]

I have drafted an interface for hyphenator implementations in libvoikko:

http://voikko.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/voikko/trunk/libvoikko/src/hyphenator/Hyphenator.hpp?view=markup

Currently this interface has no implementations. It consists of a single 
method for hyphenating words and five methods for setting options that affect 
subsequent calls to hyphenate method.

The reason why I want to get comments about this interface before implementing 
it is that I know it is not flexible enough for languages that require 
various non-standard hyphenation features. Apparently these are needed even 
in some Nordic languages and we need to change the format of result strings 
from Hyphenator::hyphenate to be able to support them. I'd like to know if 
you have any suggestions on how to do that. If there is already an existing 
format for describing such cases we could save some time by not re-inventing 
the wheel here.

Support for non-standard hyphenation in libvoikko will require a change in the 
external API as well and that cannot be done in the next release. But if we 
can agree on the internal API first, it will be easier to change the external 
API in libvoikko 3.0.

You may propose changes to hyphenator option methods as well. At least one of 
them (setIntersectCompoundLevel) may seem weird to you. I am not aware of any 
real word use cases for it and could consider removing it if you feel that it 
is not needed or too specific to the current implementation. The option is 
currently available in the external API of libvoikko and when we once broke 
it I did receive a bug report. So apparently someone was actually using it 
for something. But if there is no publicly available source code 
demonstrating its usefullness I could drop it in libvoikko 3.0.

Harri