[r-t] Blocks to be renamed as methods

[Rebecca Cox]

| Tony Cox wrote:
|
| The idea that a `method'
| can contain complete plain courses of another method
| embedded in it seems completely wrong to me.

| Alan Reading

| Isn't that really an argument against allowing methods that are false in
| the plain course?
| For any method that is false in the plain course you can always take the
| notation describing all the rows between two instances of the same row and
| call that a method in it's own right.

No, methods have to be divisible into equal parts called leads and in the vast majority of cases the changes between the false rows won't be divided into equal parts and so won't be a method.   Cross Differential is a special cases and I wonder how it was ever accepted as a method.

| Mark Davies

| But really a method is defined by its lead, and
| we've already accepted that a lead of one method can form part of the
| lead of another (e.g. Original vs PB or virtually anything else). There
| is no uniqueness of construction in ringing - you can describe a
| composition in many different ways.

But according to the current CC Decisions a method is defined by the places in its plain course, not in a lead (and there's no proposal to change this in 2017). This means that changing a single place notation element anywhere in a course, as long as it produces a round block divisible into parts, gives a different method.
I don't agree with that current definition is the correct way of defining a method but while these decisions are in place, the Methods Committee should be interpreting things according to the CC decisions not their own interpretation of how they would like them to be.

It's time to end the obsession with `methods', rename the Methods Committee as the `Ringing Committee' and recognise that methods are simply a special case of a round block. What we ring most of the time are round blocks and unless they are in a single method they are often not made up of methods but are constructed from a series of blocks of changes (usually leads or half-leads) which (according the the current decisions) are insufficient to define any method.

I raised this matter simply to illustrate the pathetically slow progress in reforming the decisions; the basic structural elements of ringing aren't yet defined in a sensible way and that needs to be done before further progress can be made.

Tony Cox




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