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Comment by georgesimon | Hacker News Reader

I think, in structural engineering terms, it refers to old natural stone wall [0] construction methods. Some bridges around me are made like this, and they're over a thousand years old.

But I agree that it's not a good adjective because I had the exact same first thought. Both "natural" and "stonewall" would be better, and they're not great names either.

[0]https://duckduckgo.com/?q=natural%20stone%20walls&ko=-1&iax=...

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Masonry just refers to working with bricks. It's old as time but we still make stuff out of bricks and you can still be a mason today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry

It seems your are saying it is only relates to bricks? But it's not, it's any stone, cut or formed.

I suppose I’m using brick by its informal definition as just a construction block.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick

But yes, historically brick meant just one type and style of material.

I associate masonry with the old ages, since this is one of the technologies you research in Civ games and back then I think people did have stones in non-standardized shapes and were just trying to fit things together. I'm not native English speaker, so I first heard this term from the games.

Yes, it has that association in English.

There's no gravity here, so the comparison makes no sense. In walls masonry construction produces sheer lines horizontally, an axis gravity is not bearing upon. This feels like taking the metaphor just a tad too literally.

I didn't think so, of you look at old stone walls, there's an absence of continuous horizontal or vertical patterns. (However the discussion was a fork, about wall building, so it was quite literal)

Surely they would not build like this. You want to avoid vertical shear planes.

"Dry stack" is another term for that, a stone wall without mortar.

In my opinion, thinking of this as a grid is misguided. It's barely different than flex columns. I would want to be able to have some objects take up more width than one column, or not have clean columns at all. Like "space filling" and "mosaic".

I don't think of dry stone walls as masonry myself. I actually think that's the distinction between masonry and not-masonry!

But anyway, I think the second last section on the link, the part that addresses the wrongness of the name, would align with your opinion.

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