VMs: RE: VMS numbering systems hypotheses...

["John Grove" <4groves@xxxxxxxxx>]

>I agree here too, and to me the character <o> has a special meaning, in the
>labels, which is not numerical.

	I was also going to broach the fact that a vast majority of labels begin
with 'o' - and if 'o' was a number I would strongly suggest o==1.

>So I am still a bit cautions about recovering a number system from the vms
>transcriptions, because I have the feeling that if there are "words" and
>"numbers", the words has to be much more common than the numbers (unless
the
>document is coded like the Beale cipher) .

	Not being too concerned about getting it all right first go through... If a
resulting stream of text looked like this... 21-4-73-18 21-5-9-14 - 142,
73-5-18-1 94-9-16 - 143 I would certainly be happy. We might not get the
'textual' portions figured out - but if we actually had the numbers (and
again the zodiac would be the best playing grounds for that IMHO). I think
(if) numbers fall into a variation of Nick's breakdown they entire 'word'
has to make one number within a label in the zodiac. Excluding portions of a
word doesn't make sense: 'otaiin' has to be (if a numeral): an entire
numeral, a numeral with an 'This is a number' indicator attached, or a
numeral with a measurement indicator attached... Like say,

otaiin = 23 degrees - the 'o' being degrees...

>If we are sure that the all vms words are numbers, shouldn't we forget
about
>cracking it, until the code book is found? :-/

Not if it's a spelling code that uses various charts/columns/rows or the
like?
Something like - columnNR + rowNr from a basic default set for some words,
and chartNR+columnNr+rowNR for others?

John.