Concepts

Foundational concepts and mental models for understanding liblevenshtein-rust.

This directory collects conceptual explainers that clarify how to think about the library rather than how to call a specific API. They establish vocabulary and intuitions that the rest of the documentation builds on. Start here if a term used elsewhere (for example, "lazy" versus "eager" automata) is unfamiliar.

Documents

Document	Purpose
LAZY_VS_EAGER_AUTOMATA.md	Explains the distinction between lazy (on-demand, simulated) and eager (precomputed) Levenshtein automata, when each applies, and the performance trade-offs.

Key idea

A query is a lazy simulation of a parameterized Levenshtein automaton walked lock-step with the dictionary; positions track (term_index, num_errors, is_special) and are pruned online by subsumption. Understanding lazy-vs-eager evaluation is the prerequisite for reasoning about the query iterators in Layer 3 and the automata in Layer 2.

Status: Living reference.

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