package com.swabunga.spell.engine;

import java.util.List;

/**
 * An interface for all dictionary implementations. It defines the most basic
 * operations on a dictionary: adding words, checking if a word is correct, and getting a list
 * of suggestions for misspelled words.
 */
public interface SpellDictionary {

  /**
   * Add a word permanently to the dictionary.
   */
  public void addWord(String word);

  /**
   * Returns true if the word is correctly spelled against the dictionary.
   */
  public boolean isCorrect(String word);

  /**
   * Returns a list of Word objects that are the suggestions to any word.
   * If the word is correctly spelled, then this method
   * could return just that one word, or it could still return a list
   * of words with similar spellings.
   * 

   * Each suggested word has a score, which is an integer
   * that represents how different the suggested word is from the sourceWord.
   * If the words are the exactly the same, then the score is 0.
   * You can get the dictionary to only return the most similiar words by setting
   * an appropriately low threshold value.
   * If you set the threshold value too low, you may get no suggestions for a given word.
   * 

   * @param sourceWord the string that we want to get a list of spelling suggestions for
   * @param scoreThreshold Any words that have score less than this number are returned.
   * @return List a List of suggested words
   * @see com.swabunga.spell.engine.Word
   */
  public List getSuggestions(String sourceWord, int scoreThreshold);
}