On Fri, 2012-05-25 at 18:55 -0700, Ed Murphy wrote: > A rule-defined entity's name generally CAN be initialized to be > the same as another rule-defined entity's name.
To start with, there's plenty of precedent that modifying an attribute of something, and creating something in a particular state, are separate occurrences. The Threat Trombones scam (before the start of Murphy's CFJ archive so I can't easily give numbers) relied on this fact, although it failed for unrelated reasons. I had CFJ 2595 in particular in mind, although it doesn't seem quite directly relevant (because the rules in question had equal power, so the "changes are secured" phrase was irrelevant and so wasn't mentioned in the judgement). Likewise, the argument that creation is the same as modification could have been brought up in CFJ 1936 (and probably would have been if people thought it was viable, because it would have been a simple way to block a scam). As such, the clause of rule 1586 against changing a rule-defined entity to have the same name as another is irrelevant here. However, rule 1586 also holds that two attempts to define rules-defined entities with the same name define the same entity. Attempting to create a rules-defined entity with the same name as another (i.e. "initializing" its name to clash with the name of another entity) clearly triggers this cause, causing the rules to define the same entity rather than two different entities. As such, the "another" part of the statement cannot hold; trying to initialize a rules-defined entity's name to be the same as another rules-defined entity's name fails because the two resulting entities are, by definition, the same (and if their definitions contradict each other, then precedence between rules will come into play). (Possible exception: if a rule that takes precedence over 1586 insists on creating two different entities with the same name, it will of course succeed. But I don't think any rules are trying to do that at the moment.) So indeed, initialization is not modification, there's plenty of precedent for that. (You can create a player in a registered state without registering it, etc.; thus, the Registrar's reports of golems "registering" are a bit misleading, Golems can't register because they can't exist in a non-registered state.) But you can't create two rules-defined entities with the same name either. I judge CFJ 3208 FALSE, and intend, with 2 support, to make CFJ 3208 Notable. -- ais523
