I'm posting this in the spirit of answering your own questions.
The question I had was: How can I implement the Levenshtein algorithm for calculating edit-distance between two strings, as described here, in Delphi?
Just a note on performance: This thing is very fast. On my desktop (2.33 Ghz dual-core, 2GB ram, WinXP), I can run through an array of 100K strings in less than one second.
function EditDistance(s, t: string): integer;
var
d : array of array of integer;
i,j,cost : integer;
begin
{
Compute the edit-distance between two strings.
Algorithm and description may be found at either of these two links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance
http://www.google.com/search?q=Levenshtein+distance
}
//initialize our cost array
SetLength(d,Length(s)+1);
for i := Low(d) to High(d) do begin
SetLength(d[i],Length(t)+1);
end;
for i := Low(d) to High(d) do begin
d[i,0] := i;
for j := Low(d[i]) to High(d[i]) do begin
d[0,j] := j;
end;
end;
//store our costs in a 2-d grid
for i := Low(d)+1 to High(d) do begin
for j := Low(d[i])+1 to High(d[i]) do begin
if s[i] = t[j] then begin
cost := 0;
end
else begin
cost := 1;
end;
//to use "Min", add "Math" to your uses clause!
d[i,j] := Min(Min(
d[i-1,j]+1, //deletion
d[i,j-1]+1), //insertion
d[i-1,j-1]+cost //substitution
);
end; //for j
end; //for i
//now that we've stored the costs, return the final one
Result := d[Length(s),Length(t)];
//dynamic arrays are reference counted.
//no need to deallocate them
end;