Re: VMs: Original encoding scheme

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Larry,

At 20:03 11/06/2003 -0400, Larry Roux wrote:
> Nick wrote: "...if there are numbers anywhere in there, we should have 
> found them by now, surely?"
>
> One could just as easily say "If there were words in there we should have 
> found them by now, surely" too. The same with glyphs. By your context the 
> Voy contains neither words nor numbers nor glyphs.  So it MUST be a hoax.

For my sins, I was being ironic: in future, I'll try to remember to flag 
this with an <IRONY> ... </IRONY> xml wrapper. :-)  [*]

So, rephrasing my original post: if there are any lightly-hidden numbers in 
the VMS, then we should have found them by now, surely? But if the VMS' 
code-maker was so smart as to make the rest of the coding system 
near-impenetrable, why make the numbers so easy to read?

Personally, I like the idea of a <dain daiin daiiin daiun daun dauin> 
"steganographic apothecary" numbering system, as it's just about as 
sophisticated as I think we can deal with (much subtler and we probably 
don't stand a chance). :-)  Incidentally, I noticed a number of (-us 
suffix?) words in Georg Hayniger's MS ending with a looped-back terminating 
character, quite similar to an EVA <n> - this might be quite a good match 
for "primus, secundus, tertius", etc.

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

[*] ...this sentence may of course be ironic too. :-) 


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