lucky you :) there was no wikipedia when I first ran into this algorithm. Foxpro for DOS & Novell Netware had an implementation of Levenshtein distance that I ended up using as part of a college project on database basics. I used it to detect typos in data entry by comparing entered names with all names already in the table. It was blazingly fast because we never exceeded 30 names (the size of our class) and my profs were super impressed because they thought I did something way more complicated than I had.