[r-t] Adjacency in Extension

[Don Morrison]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 2:19 PM Mark Davies <mark at snowtiger.net> wrote:
> Looking back at Don's point re: Kent, it's clear that the start x56x
> looks a lot more like Kent than some of the other overwork extensions
> which do preserve adjacency.

I presume you meant to type “56x56” rather than “x56x”?

> Why shouldn't extension work starting with four bell? There's
> something wrong with our approach it if doesn't. There are plenty of
> Treble Dodging Minimus methods, too - including Kent.

Well, a lot of things go, if not “wrong”, certainly “different”, when you
get down to minimus. The whole (I have argued rather silly, though I
concede we’re possibly stuck with them now) distinction between treble bob,
surprise and delight evaporates down there. As that class distinction is,
presumably, a desired* property to preserve across extension it makes
things, well, confusing, doesn’t it? As you said, perhaps this is yet more
evidence that there is something wrong with the current approach to
extension.



* The whole point of having “extension” is we want to keep the same names
for the “same” method at higher stages. The usual argument for preserving
the distinctions treble bob, surprise and delight is to carve the available
name space up into three pieces so more people can call a method “Mumble”
by ringing unrelated methods of different classes (“Spitalfields Festival”
is the poster child for this). That would seem to argue that extension
should preserve class distinction. While I can easily imagine that the most
natural extension of, say, a surprise minor method might be a delight major
one, such a thing would rather make a mess of the partitioned name space
stuff. Though, to me, it’s really one more yet another argument for the
class distinction being an unfortunate one.




-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
“As far as I’m concerned, there won’t be a Beatles reunion as long as
John Lennon remains dead.”
  — the late George Harrison, statement to /The New York Times/,
       1 December 1989.
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