Pilish

Pilish is a style of constrained writing in which the lengths of consecutive words match the digits of the number π (pi).

Examples

The following sentence is an example which matches the first fifteen digits of π:

How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!

The following Pilish poem (written by Joseph Shipley) matches the first 31 digits of π:

But a time I spent wandering in bloomy night;
Yon tower, tinkling chimewise, loftily opportune.
Out, up, and together came sudden to Sunday rite,
The one solemnly off to correct plenilune.

A full-length Pilish novel has been published,[1] which currently holds the record of the longest Pilish text with 10,000 digits.

Rule sets

In order to deal with occurrences of the digit zero, the following rule set was introduced (referred to as Basic Pilish):

In Basic Pilish, each word of n letters represents
(1) The digit n if n < 10
(2) The digit 0 if n = 10

Since long runs of small non-zero digits are difficult to deal with naturally (such as 1121 or 1111211), another rule set called Standard Pilish was introduced:

In Standard Pilish, each word of n letters represents
(1) The digit n if n < 10
(2) The digit 0 if n = 10
(3) Two consecutive digits if n > 10
(for example, a 12-letter word, such as "sleepwalking," represents the digits 1,2)
gollark: It has a terminal and filesystem API too.
gollark: I'll add a thing to potatOS for the size issue, please hold on.
gollark: WRONG!
gollark: I fixed some stuff.
gollark: If your update daemon works right (please run `log` and look for stuff relating to that), potatOS *should* be able to update to the latest version.

See also

References
  1. Keith, Michael (2010). Not A Wake. Vinculum Press. ISBN 0-9630097-1-0.
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