On 10/17/2010 10:59 AM, Michael D. Adams wrote:
"The biggest challenge was not in creating those tables, but in
understanding the nuances of the rules, by the way."
Two questions so I can understand better.
First, by nuances do you mean the nuances of how the rules interact
(which I think would be simplified by using a definition as I have
proposed) or some other nuance?
Neither - as they evolved over time, the rules were revised to more
clearly state how to handle certain edge cases and to remove language
that could be (and had been) misinterpreted. In other words, the
statement of the rules has improved. Now that we have a field-tested set
of rules, it's of course easy to re-write them, because you can be
certain to know what they mean.
Perhaps by going your route, we would have arrived at the same result.
Who knows. That's the difference between theory and history. History
takes one, and only one of the possible paths to get to a result, and it
doesn't give a bit about whether that path was optimal.
If you'd been a contributor then, history might well have proceeded
differently.
Cheers,
A./
