Why was ispell removed?

[Lowell Gilbert]

Stephen Fisher <sfisher at SDF.ORG> writes:

> I recently noticed that the ispell port has been removed in favor of the 
> aspell-ispell port ("ispell compatibility script for aspell").  Does 
> anyone know why it was removed?  All I see on Fresh Ports is that it 
> was deprecated and finally removed in January of this year.  

Because it had lived a long and fruitful life and deserved to be put out
of its misery?

> (The ispell script for aspell doesn't fully replicate ispell 
> functionality such as checking words on the command line as shown below)
>
> Real ispell:
>>ispell
> @(#) International Ispell Version 3.3.02 12 Jun 2005
> word: word
> ok
>
>
> word: ^D
>
>
>
> aspell script:
>>ispell
> Ispell compatibility script for Aspell.
> Usage: /usr/local/bin/ispell [options] -a|-l|-v[v]|-c|-e[1-4]|<file>

It's a *very* minimal script, all right. 

But that's a pretty minor feature, isn't it? I always used "-a" with
ispell for doing that kind of thing, anyway, and aspell's version of
that is pretty close to what I remember of ispell's output. [Though, to
be honest, I have never really used spellcheckers very much.]