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Comment by gnull

3 years ago

Reminds me of this guy I met at a CTF. He decided that punctuation generally is unnecessary. What's the use of having so many different symbols if the only thing they denote is pauses between words.

so when he wrote something . he used only periods to denote pauses . no other punctuation symbols . no capital letters . some people were thinking that his periods stand for perl concatenation operators . i dont know if he is still doing this . i hope he stopped

6 comments

gnull

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dredmorbius  3 years ago

Writing is a recorded symbolic convention for the benefit of the sufficiently educated reader.

Eschewingallpunctuationforscriptocontinuaisofcourseppossiblethoughitishelltoread.Itisevendifficulttotypewithoutaddingthespacesreflexivelyifindasipostthis.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua>

There's a reason monks of old read aloud. It was about the only way to confirm the actual meaning of a text.

sundarurfriend  3 years ago

actually i kinda love that . punctuation is semi arbitrary anyway . and this is actually much easier to read than the usual literary english full of semicolons and dashes . mimics speech much better too .

  • jameshart  3 years ago

    I think it mimics a certain kind of speech.

    Some people do talk like that . All complete thoughts . Sequential.

    Other people—and I very much count myself among them—have a less linear, more tree-like mode of expression; where the ideas, instead of building on what came before, are being laid out out of order – the ideas aren’t completed – and more complex punctuation is needed to establish the relationships between those thoughts.

    It sounds like I’m saying the former is less sophisticated than the latter. I don’t think that’s true.

    I think we should probably try to express our ideas in a way that doesn’t require out-of-sequence reasoning. Short, simple sentences. With clear meanings. Building on one another. Much easier to follow.

    The tree-like mode of endless nested parentheticals and asides is just a rendering of an incomplete thought process.

    Not better or more sophisticated. Just still in progress.