Imagine you're encoding morse in a protocol that has only an instant pulse. you can't do a dash, only dots.
But you can encode a dot as two dots with a short gap between them, and a dash by two dots with a long gap between them.
And you can of course merge adjacent dots: V is ···-, but you don't need eight dots to represent that, you need 5:
dot-short-dot-short-dot-short-dot-long-dot
and an extra-long gap between two dots is a space
if my math is correct, you encode "hello world" in 39 dots
This is a common trope in films: The hero, incarcerated by the villain or otherwise trapped in an enclosed space, uses knocks to communicate with the outside world via Morse code. How is this supposed to work, assuming it was ever used in practice? Morse code consists of short signals (dots), long signals (dashes), and silence (pauses). When I knock a solid surface, it makes one singular tapping sound; I can’t control the length of the sound. Is it that the sender marks not the signal itself but...
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
psf