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shinarit t1_iuccwte wrote

Reply to comment by sr20rocket in ELI5: Morse code is made up of dots and dashes. How did telegraph operators keep from losing track of where one letter ended and another began? by copperdomebodhi

No, it's ternary. How many silences you use doesn't make it have a larger alphabet. It has three letters.

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robbak t1_iuclq9l wrote

If you think of Morse that way, the you can call a 'dash' two 'dots' in a row and make it binary again.

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shinarit t1_iucsdnj wrote

You can call anything anything else, but that doesn't make it so. A dotdot is not valid morse code.

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robbak t1_iucues1 wrote

Then the character breaking words, SpaceSpace, isn't valid either and is a separate character to the single space, and Space^7 is also a separate character for the word break, making Morse code a 5 character language.

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shinarit t1_iucw5vy wrote

You can name all combinations and then it's a regular 27 character language. That doesn't make it so, that's an abstraction. Every language can be deconstructed into binary, but Morse has an obvious ternary system that is closest to its actual usage.

Dot dot is not valid. Dot space dot IS valid. Space is not valid. Seven space is valid. Do you need me to draw up the formal language rules?

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robbak t1_iud6nvg wrote

Are they differennt from:

Dot - length 1.
Dash - length 2 (so could be considered 2 dots together).
Space between dots/dashes - length 1
Space between letters - length 3 (so could be considered 3 spaces together)
Space between words - length 7 (so could be considered 7 spaces together)

If you recognise the dot and dash as 2 different things, then should you not also recognise the different length spacings as well?

If you were considering Morse as a computer encoding, you'd recognise 4 symbols - Dot-space, or 'high-low', for a dot, Dash-space (High-high-low) for a dash, 'low-low' (following the 2 above with a trailing space) for a letter delimiter, and 6 spaces for a word delimiter. But we'd still call this a binary encoding.

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