Re: VMs: Blanks

[elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Zitat von "Maurizio M. Gavioli" <mmg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:


Two cents...

> Hi ...
> I mean: there are occurrences of cyphers ignoring the blanks altogether? 
> And of cyphers *restoring* 'faked' blanks (randomly?) in the cripted text? 
> Or, at the other end, of cyphers considering the blank a character in 
> itself, taking part to the cripting algorithm?
> 
> Thanks,
>          Maurizio
> 

As was pointed out here, the notion of a space as "just another character" is 
fairly new. I also seem to remember early medieval manuscripts (plaintext), 
which didn't have spaces at all, but the reader had to sort out where a word 
ended and where the next began.

Omitting spaces in the encryption process, or grouping symbols to "words" of 
arbitrary length was certainly practice. (And is. During the cold war, you 
could listen freely on your radio to East German and Russian transmissions of 
secret messages in groups of five digits. Aah, the good old days...) 
_Introducing_ spaces, or even using the space as a cipher character was pretty 
much unknown, though, AFAIK.

Anyway, if we take a look at the VM, we find that eg letter groups seem to 
cluster around group beginnings (like the notorious "qo") or at group ends 
("iiin"). Which means that either your characteristic letter sequence is 
really "[space]qo", or a group is indeed a "word", a linguistic unit.

Besides, the problem with "half spaces" isn't solved that way. I'd even expect 
ambiguities about spacing ("Is that a seperator or not?") would be worse if the 
spaces were part of the code rather than part of the plaintext.

Tallyho,

   Elmar


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