[r-t] A tentative question about principles

[Don Morrison]

On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Philip Earis <Earisp at rsc.org> wrote:
> A "principle" is the name given to a method that has no hunt bell(s).

If you care about what the Central Council says, I believe that's not
quite enough. According to the Council a principle is a method with no
hunt bell(s) that also has all the bells doing the same work and has
the same number of leads in the plain course as there are bells. The
Council distinguishes between principles and pure "differentials,"
which have two or more subsets of the bells doing different work.

Again, as Philip stated, whether or not such distinctions are useful
is a matter of taste and context.

This does raise a question, though: is it possible to have a method
with no hunt bell(s) where all the bells do the same work, but there
are not the same number of leads as bells? The Council's definitions
appear to be carefully addressing such a case, but it's not clear to
me that it can arise in practice. Can someone provide an example of
such a method?



-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
"A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the
point of doubtful sanity."
     -- Robert Frost, quoted in _The New Republic_ 25 October 1958