Re: Doing better at HINTing an appropriate column within errorMissingColumn()

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 1:10 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> I had two thoughts:
>
> 1. Should we consider making levenshtein available to frontend programs
> as well as backend?

I don't think so. Why would that be useful?

> 2. Would it provide better matching to use Damerau-Levenshtein[1] instead
> of raw Levenshtein?

Maybe that would be marginally better than classic Levenshtein
distance, but I doubt it would pay for itself. It's just more code to
maintain. Are we really expecting to not get the best possible
suggestion due to some number of transposition errors very frequently?
You still have to have a worse suggestion spuriously get ahead of
yours, and typically there just aren't that many to begin with. I'm
not targeting spelling errors so much as thinkos around plurals and
whether or not an underscore was used. Damerau-Levenshtein seems like
an algorithm with fairly specialized applications.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan