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

[Martin Cansdale]

On 20 Oct 2014 17:53, "Tim Barnes" <tjbarnes23 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I don't think we can go purely by how people learn things when classifying
methods. I turned up for a peal attempt a couple of years ago in a
conventional method which became cyclic if rung from snap to snap. When the
conductor checked before we started, it became clear that there was a
roughly equal split between those who'd learned the conventional method,
and those who'd learned the rotation. If we'd been successful, which method
would we have named?

> 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.

A machine readable notation for this would seem useful, and not
problematic. Better, I'd say, to have a syntax that can cope with edge
cases like snap starts than to have 32 rotations of superlative in the
methods collections.

MJC