Re: Gallowspace

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

By my calculations, Mike Roe's original word generator has (3 x 2 x ((2 x 
2) + 6 + 4)) = 84 possible paths: whereas in Gallowspace, it only has 
((2x2) + 6 + 4) x 3) = 42.

42 is much closer to European alphabet size (ie, French with accents and a 
few abbreviations), so Gallowspace would definitely seem to have numerical 
merit at the very least.

Also: after having tried to "read" some pages in a Gallowspace mindset, I 
have to say that a number of pages only "took shape" (to my eyes) if the 
"8" character was also read as a space.

Finally: one further possibility is that the various gallows characters 
could be not just <space>, but (say) <[punctuation] space> - the complete 
absence of punctuation in the document is one of the obvious identifying 
features of the VMS (though far from unprecedented).

Please forgive my ignorance, but what punctuation signs were commonly used 
in similar era documents? And with what kinds of relative frequency did 
they occur in such documents?

(...you can see where this is heading...)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....