RE: VMs: Word Endings

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John,

At 07:23 12/07/2003 -0400, John Grove wrote:
> The final stroke in every character?

FWIW, I only envisage <ch> as being the terminal character in heavily 
shortened words, not in every word. Real word endings I envisage existing 
mainly in the middle of fake words, whether <ch> or not.

BTW, if I were an encoder using such diacritic marks to help disambiguate 
the encoded text, I think I'd perhaps use the position of the loop (over 
the <ch>) to indicate the length of the real replacement. Such a kind of 
semi-improvisational approach might look like:-
        loop on left    --> look for a short replacement
        loop in middle  --> look for a medium length replacement
        loop on right   --> look for a long replacement
        teardrop        --> look for an unexpected replacement (?)
        no mark --> use the most sensible replacement

> Wouldn't that make reading it back a little more challenging even for
> the originator?

For coding systems constructed sequentially (ie, where the outputs of each 
intermediate stage form the inputs of the next stage), the answer is: yes, 
of course.

But coding systems constructed in parallel (ie, where each character or 
word is transformed according to one of a constellation of different 
ciphers) are more like an extreme form of steganography, and are more like 
a tricksy group of conditional monoalphabetic ciphers. So, for such 
systems, I think the answer is: probably not a great deal, once you've got 
used to it.

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


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