Re: [Golly-test] modified JvN

[Tom R. <ro...@gm...>]

You make some good points, Andrew.  Let's see what Tim says; he's
got tons more experience than I do in this particular rule set.

I am happy any way; short names or long names.  If people do intend
to type names, clearly shorter is somewhat better, but your new
context-sensitive system (!) sounds great, as does the rule.html idea.

-tom

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 5:08 PM, Andrew Trevorrow <an...@tr...> wrote:
> Tom:
>
>> On the names of the rules, I think we should think about those names just
>> a bit more; once we distribute, those names will be widely distributed.
>> Slightly longer names don't hurt anything, and the descriptiveness can
>> be beneficial.  I don't think people will ever *type* rule names, just select
>> them from a drop down or read them from a file.
>
> Hmm, I'm in the habit of opening Set Rule and typing in rules, so
> shorter is better as far as I'm concerned.  I sometimes find it
> quicker than using the named rule menu.  But I guess I'm not a
> typical user.  I can see the advantage of descriptive rule names,
> but having to type them in docs and email messages will get rather
> tiresome.  No big deal though.
>
>> I've never been a fan of the "EVN" name; I presume E is for extended, but
>> of course there are a million different ways to extend.  I'm tempted to
>> suggest "Nobili-JvN-32" as the rule name for these; at the very least this
>> gives the novice user a search term to use when looking for documentation.
>
> Speaking of documentation, I'm in the middle of making some changes to
> the Set Rule dialog.  I've added an algo menu which can change as you
> type in a rule, so you get immediate feedback on whether or not a rule
> is valid.  I've also added a help button which will display a html
> file based on the current algo.  For example, if the algo menu shows
> QuickLife then the help will display Help/Algorithms/QuickLife.html.
> The idea is that each <algoname>.html file will contain a description
> of the algorithm and the rules it supports, along with some example
> rule strings that can be copied and pasted into the rule box.
>
>> Following this convention, I suspect yours might want to be named
>> Hutton-JvN-32 (or however many states there are).  The fact that we drop
>> Nobili from that name doesn't worry me too much; you made the last
>> changes and the provenance would be clear from searching for your name
>> and your description of the rules.
>>
>> I'm just not completely happy with three-letter rule names, especially as
>> we move into a future with many rule sets extended in various ways.
>>
>> Consider the precedent set by Mirek's Celebration, where the rule set
>> names are user-oriented.
>
> We also allow users to assign names to rules so I'm not sure how
> that is relevant.
>
>> I don't think we need to preserve any sort of backwards compatibility;
>> those files we ship will be corrected, and that's all there is to it.
>> Any files created up to now I would consider testing/alpha level files
>> and converting them to use the new names would be trivial.
>
> Yep, I've no problem with that.
>
> Anyway, we need to make a decision on this.  Tom, jvnalgo is your baby
> so you should have final say on the rule names.  I have a slight
> preference for the short names Tim suggested, but I don't really mind
> if we go for descriptive names.  So the canonical rules should be:
>
> JvN-29
> Nobili-JvN-32
> Hutton-JvN-32
>
> Correct?
>
> Andrew
>
>
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