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Appendix C History

Roan started out in the mid-1970s as code to support searching for compositions using Portable Standard Lisp on a Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 machine. A few years later a bunch of utilities for UNIX, written in C, were added. By the mid-1980s it had expanded significantly into collections of Apollo Domain Lisp and Lisp Machine Lisp code. From there to a highly portability-challenged version for Digitool Macintosh Common Lisp, followed by a more portable version that I used for several years, predominately with CLISP. Over the years I’ve even “ported” it (if you can call a complete rewrite in a different language a “port”) to a few other programming languages where I used it for various lengths of time. Eventually I tried to make a more tidy, fairly portable Common Lisp version, and have been happily using this for my compositional activities in recent years. It also underpins the method presentation stuff on the ringing.org web site.

Over the years several folks received copies of it, and in some cases used it, at least for a little while. I think it was used for a time on a Lisp Machine to drive a set of electronic Christmas tree ornamental bells ringing touches! But despite such use, it was never well organized or documented.

In a fit of good-neighorliness I’ve finally tried to make it sufficiently tidy for more general distribution and added this documentation, in the hopes that others may find it useful, too.

As you can easily deduce from its history, lots of things have come and gone over the years, and there are lots of parts that have fallen into disrepair or don’t play well with other parts. In tidying it up for distribution I’m trying to fix that. Public releases of Roan will contain only portions that have been reasonably well tested and that do play well together, but there’s still a lot of work to do resurrecting, tidying and documenting other features of varied antiquity and robustness. I’m hopeful that in coming months and years I’ll be able to offer more releases with more good stuff added to them.


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C.1 What’s with the name?

Robert Roan was an important seventeenth century ringer and composer. He is widely believed to have invented Grandsire Doubles and Plain Bob Minor, and by implication, the “standard extent” of minor.

Sadly, his name is less well known among most ringers than some other early composers, probably because he’s had the misfortune of never having had a method named after him. So several decades ago it seemed fitting to name a library of software intended for use in composition after him. In keeping with Robert Roan’s relative obscurity, it’s taken several decades for the eponymous software to become publicly available.


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