[r-t] Consultation

[Alan Burlison]

On 09/04/2017 16:13, Robin Woolley wrote:

> AB asked 'Are these rules written down anywhere?' Was the answer Hayden
> gave the answer to the question you asked? I thought you were asking
> where the 'dodge-3, miss-2, dodge-3' comes from because that's what
> Roddy & I were talking about. In which case, the answer is no! b.t.w.,
> Decision (G) is the mishmash you get as a result of trying to write down
> a simple(*) concept as in describing the colour of the sky - which just
> happen to be blue. (*) - leastways, I think it is. If you had seen it
> done, you'd agree!

Ah, I didn't realise there were two sets of rules, formal and informal - 
I was aware of the council decisions but had never looked at them in 
detail.  I have been following the recent discussion about their 
update/replacement on the list, but mostly just the organisational 
aspects and how it might affect "ordinary" ringers who weren't doing 
method composition.

The comment that Roddy made about Place Notation being an adequate 
mechanism for describing methods but not for handling extensions, your 
comment about some methods only existing at a limited number of stages 
and the subsequent discussion did pique my interest. From my position of 
utter ignorance, Don's point about their being no single set of 
extension rules that work for all methods did seem to make sense to me - 
if I'm following correctly there are:

1. Rules that all methods have to comply with in order to be acceptable.

2. Algorithms for generating method stages, some of which may be 
per-method, some can be based on place notation, others are not.

3. Rules about what actually constitutes a valid extension, e.g. not 
introducing a feature that is absent in the parent. That restricts the 
set of allowable stage generation algorithms.

4. Rules which allow taxonomic classification of methods.

Then again, it's highly likely I'm plain wrong :-)

I don't want to derail the conversation any further, but it's certainly 
interesting to follow the discussion - I'll go back to lurking now :-)

-- 
Alan Burlison
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