Re: VMs: A very important discovery!!

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> The control function could just be: here is the
> start of a new paragraph.

It needn't even be a control function.  Many languages - and this applies
to simple encryptions of them, too - tend to begin sentences with a rather
limited range of particles.  A Latin example might be more appropriate
here, but what springs to mind is Omaha-Ponca e'gidhe 'and then, as you'd
expect', gaN 'so', kki 'and', gaNkki 'and so', ... Sentences with
particular functions are even more likely to begin with a particular
particle relevant to the function, and, of course, the first sentence in a
paragraph generally indicates a new topic in some way.

But my point relative to the distribution of gallows characters was not
that they didn't occur in words at the begining of paragraphs, but that
they also occur lots of other places - everywhere, in fact, including
toward the end of longish words.  Many English paragraphs and sentences
begin with "The ..." but t does not indicate the beginning of anything,
though capitalization does.

So, unless the very existence of a gallows character is taken to define a
units of text, as in Ridderstad's approach, it seems to me that the first
step is to tally gallows along the lines of

g-char, ..., non-g-char, ...
vs.
start of word, medial-in-word, end-of-word, first-word-of-line,
medial-word-in-line, ...

Maybe somebody's done this?

Of course, if you do take Ridderstad's approach it would be very likely
that the beginning of each encription task would begin with a gallows
(possibly preceded by a row selector).  But in that case the existence of
even a few unaccounted for exceptions would suggest some sort of
coincidence and tend to demolish the theory.

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