Dear Rett,

You wrote:

> Yes looking at it now I think you're right that even those bars can be
> a fairly recent development.

No, I think they are quite old. I have both edited and seen early medieval
Sanskrit mss (C11th +) which use both the single and the double da.n.da (the
"bar") as quasi commas and full-stops. Although not strictly a punctuation
mark, one also finds various kinds of circular or dotted cross symbols used
to mark the ends of sections and paragraphs. I imagine that the situation
with early Pali mss would have been the same

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge