[r-t] Central Council Methods Library

[Don Morrison]

On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 8:08 PM, Graham John <graham at changeringing.co.uk>
wrote:
> Also Blocks are treated as a class of method rather than being
> excluded from the format completely as non-method blocks.

Oh, do we still have non-method blocks? For some reason I thought those
were finally gone. Wishful thinking, I suppose. :-)

> much of what they provided is now much better served by … the XML
> data for serious developers.

For mechanical things, yes. But not for humans.

> I had assumed that the main use of text would be for a bit of casual
> downloading into spreadsheets

Tony’s text format is ill-suited for pulling into spreadsheets. If you
wanted to do so, you’d have to fiddle it quite a bit by hand first.

But, while the new text format imports easily into a spreadsheet, for
reasons I gave in an earlier email, it’s not so useful: you need to do some
seriously non-spreadsheet sorts of activities to, say, get all the lead end
J (non-little, single dodging) surprise major methods start with notation
x5x4, and containing FCH B. That’s surprisingly straightforward to do from
Tony’s format simply using a good text editor.

Put another way, I find the text format (that is, Tony’s existing one)
quite convenient for looking a bunch of methods together, particularly
since it is sorted by notation rather than name. Not ideal, but it often
meets my needs well enough. I don’t know if others make similar use of it.
But if it, or something like it, is no longer available I will have to
write some tools to support tasks which I can currently do informally using
nothing more complicated than a text editor.



-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
“The only truly serious questions are the ones that even a child can
formulate.”  — Milan Kundera, /The Unbearable Lightness of Being/,
                         tr Michael Henry Heim
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