On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Julian Fitzell wrote:

>  Other than that, though, it works great: we used it for a sales
>  system and it allowed users to stop asking people to spell their names
>  over the phone.  I've tried typing in every convoluted spelling of my
>  name I can think of and it always finds me :)

And the code we used was (man, this is pretty old, these days I would use
streams...):

initialize

	SoundexMap _ Dictionary new.
	#('bpfv' 'cskgjqxz' 'dt' 'l' 'mn' 'r') doWithIndex:
            [:r :i | r do: [:c | SoundexMap at: c put: i asString first]].
	'aeiouyhw ' do: [:c | SoundexMap at: c put: nil].

soundex: aString

	|soundex i lastCode|
	soundex _ '0000' copy.
	aString isEmpty ifTrue: [^ soundex].
	soundex at: 1 put: (aString asUppercase at: 1).
	lastCode _ i _ 1.
	aString asLowercase allButFirst do:
		[:c | |code|
		(i < 4) ifTrue:
			[code _ SoundexMap at: c ifAbsent:[].
			 ((code = lastCode) or: [code isNil]) ifFalse:
                             [i := i + 1.
			     soundex at: i put: code].
			 lastCode _ code]].
	^ soundex