• BlackRose@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        I’d say it’s quinary but can easily be represented binarily

        1. short mark, dot or dit ( ▄ ): 1

        2. longer mark, dash or dah ( ▄▄▄ ): 111

        3. intra-character gap (between the dits and dahs within a character): 0

        4. short gap (between letters): 000

        5. medium gap (between words): 0000000

              • BlackRose@slrpnk.net
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                1 year ago

                Optimized to use less symbols by combining them (long gap between words is just three short gaps). I also think if a sentence ends, there would be the unnessecary 0 from the dots and Dashes at the end.

                • jungle@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Yeah, that extra 0 also irks me, it’s the typical issue when concatenating words, that requires a trim() at the end.

                  But it’s not an issue in terms of showing that you need three symbols to represent Morse code.

        • jungle@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes, the space is a necessary symbol in Morse code, otherwise it’s impossible to decode.

          • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Makes sense. I remember asking myself whether Morse was a form of Huffman encoding back when I was learning that stuff. And it kinda is going for that, but without actually doing it properly since it wasn’t a binary code per se and so could use the pauses. “Ternary” makes sense.

            • jungle@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Right, Morse was actually mentioned as an example when I was learning Huffman encoding. :)

    • Lifted_lowered@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Unless I’m mistaken I would say that it’s the other way around, Morse code is more like a human readable machine language expressed in binary because the 26 character alphabet is expressed in different binary values, much like ASCII.