[r-t] Minor Blocks: Poll results

[Matthew Frye]

On 19 Jul 2014, at 20:19, Mark Davies <mark at snowtiger.net> wrote:

> Iain Anderson writes,
> 
>> Ten years ago it was blindingly obvious to me what
>> a lead was and what a method was.  Now I don't think I have a clue.
> 
> Fair comment!

Goodness. Just how deep does this rabbit hole go?
I think we need some serious thought as to how and which direction to define important things. Do we define a method as being made up of leads, or do we define a lead as a sub-section of a method?

What if we decide to define a method in terms of a composition? Something along the lines of a method being a standard sub-section of a composition? For a suitably broad definition of "composition" (which would need to be thought of) this is a pleasantly general definition, covering methods (both conventional and modern radical ones), dixonoids, cylindrical and probably anything else you could think of. Then you could have a lead as the standard way of defining a conventional method, whereas a dixonoid would be defined by a set of rules, but both types could still be acknowledged as methods (as they rightly should be).

I suppose what we really should have done was to start by agreeing what "ringing" is, and then worked from there...

> In fact I think that any given block of changes should yield one method and only one method, and this method should also be classifiable and fall into one and only one classification. I think this is useful, because methods are the atomic building blocks of change-ringing. Also I don't think it is very difficult to do.

And we should put carts in front of horses, because that's alphabetical order? And it's not very difficult to do.

MF