[r-t] Does a rotation by any other name smell as sweet?

[Tim Barnes]

> DFM:
> I believe the only three people to have replied to this have replied
that they view them as the same. You learn something new every day:
this unanimity surprises me.
> I guess I'm an outlier here, but I would find them different...

As a blue-line ringer, if I was asked to splice these two methods, I'd have
to learn 2 blue lines for each place bell, and I'd have to give each method
some sort of name to distinguish the place bell pairs.  I would do this
while also having some awareness that the two methods were related.

More importantly, if splicing these two methods became popular for some
reason, and different composers produced various compositions, then without
the ability to name both methods in the central library, composers would
have to come up with their own notations to specify their compositions,
thereby leading to a loss of standardization.

Furthermore, if you include a rotation of a method in a composition of
spliced even without including the original method, if you can't name the
rotation, you'd have to footnote the composition with something like "Where
it says to ring method x, you actually ring a rotation of method x starting
at change no. 6."  This seems messy and makes it harder to store
compositions in a machine-readable format.

My bigger point is this:  it seems the essential rules of ringing can be
captured as simply as: (1) a method is any sequence of changes; (2) a call
is any modification to a method's changes; (3) compositions are made up of
methods and calls; and (4) compositions must start and end in rounds and be
true.  I can't think of any peal that adhered to 1-4 above that I wouldn't
be happy to see allowed as a peal.

This framework seems to be simple, generic, elegant, tidy, allow for
maximum innovation, etc, and would have what seems to be the huge advantage
of being easily understandable by average ringers, and also by average
Central Council members who would have to vote in rules like this.  If the
price to pay for having a simple framework like this is that a few methods
get added to the Method Collections that are trivial rotations of other
methods, that seems a small price to pay for the overall simplicity and
effectiveness of this framework.  I also think we can trust ringers not to
overly abuse the Method Collections.  Many n-part peal compositions at
stage s could be named today as n-lead methods with s-n hunt bells.  But
ringers generally choose not to do this, and I doubt ringers would choose
to ring Stedman with a different start as a different method.

However, I sense I might be in the minority on eliminating the restriction
on rotations.  In which case, I'd echo some previous posts and say let's
keep the existing rotation ban, rather than try to construct new rules for
rotations based on what calls are used and/or where the hunt bell symmetry
is in relation to the lead end (if there are hunt bells) and/or whether
reversals are involved, etc.  The latter seems to be going down the same
sort of path that led to the current rules.

Final point: we allow reversals to be separately named - aren't rotations
just another way of reordering changes in a lead?

TJB