From: David Bartoli <djb1@acpub.duke.edu>
  To  : 
  Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 00:39:31 -0500

indexing for goofi

I have  a simple question and I just wanted to know exactly how we
should work on this. I noticed in "poe.txt" that not everything is white
space delimited. For instance, in the first paragraph we see the segment

"definitely settled-but the very"
which, by my supposition, would treat "settled-but" as a hyphenated
word. Now, with hyphenated words, are we supposed to allow a search for
only the hyphenation, or for each element that the hyphen separates
(which would cause very much difficulty)?

Then this brings me to yet another difficulty encountered. Say we have
an "apostrophe'd" word (either a contraction or a possessive object),
how should we treat these.

For "body's", I am sure we would want to only have the search count for
"body"

But for "don't" I am sure we would not want to search for "don".

Now, I have no idea if I am being too picky or if I am noticing a
difficult specification in this assignment. It just seems to me that a
lot of hard-coding would have to be used to hack through this situation,
and I am not sure if it is worth sacrificing the design to account for
this.

Somebody please help before I get myself into too deep of water. Thanks

dave