[Dragaera] Dragaeran programming

[Dorothy J Heydt]

>This is as hard as writing a book (or just a short post) without using a
>particular highly-common symbol.

It can be done, though, and has been.  

Cf. (1) _Gadsby_, a novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, written
entirely withyout the letter E.

(except, presumably, in the author's name on the title page.)

For a shorter and much more readable example, in the Ellery Queen
whodunit _The Origin of Evil_ a threatening letter is written in
rather flowery language, and it's only at the _moment juste_ that
Queen reveals the whole thing was written without the letter T
... at a time at which one of the suspects had a typewriter with
a broken T bar.

Wouldn't work with modern word processors, now, would it?  Unless
the appropriate key on the keyboard was broken and the writer had
to work around that.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at kithrup.com