"singhals" wrote: > Richard Smith wrote: > > My point is that fuzzy rules *such as* these are useful, not that > > these specific rules are of universal applicability.  In England, > > Many posters to this list/newsgroup aren't in England and/or > don't deal with British research. English norms are the example I'm using because they're the ones I'm most familiar with, and I don't imagine they're will be totally alien to others on the newsgroup, even if they're not especially applicable to their own research. But as I just said, rules *such as these* are useful. The specific rules I was talking about may not be. > And, not everyone wants to re-jigger their program.   Unfortunately, that's precisely the attitude that has resulted in the current generation of programs, most of which are grossly inadequate. The "one size fits all" approach doesn't work well, at least not for something as complicated as genealogical research. To take an example, I want my program to know that if I enter a date in 1720, unless I tell it otherwise, it's in the Julian calendar, but if I enter a date in 1820, it's a Gregorian date. That's something that needs customising. In Britain, the calendar change happened in 1752; in France, in 1582; in Russia, not until 1918. For many people. most of the time, they'll be dealing with one country and having a default makes sense; but others might be dealing with a family that moved around frequently, and for them a default calendar change might be more of a nuisance than a help. I'm far more interested in using (and if necessary, writing) a program that's flexible enough to cope with the subtleties and ambiguities that crop up in real life, than something that's easy to use and has a pretty interface. (That said, I don't necessarily see these as contradictory goals.) If I'm going to spend thousands of hours using the software to organise my research, I certainly don't begrudge a extra quarter-hour configuring it so that it's right for me. You're right that not everyone will agree, but it's unlikely that an event- oriented genealogy program, as opposed to the many existing lineage- oriented ones, will appeal to them anyway. > Worse, in some cases, families > combine cultures, norms, religions ... few would want a > program that forces them to use a different program or > dataset for each branch of the family. A good point, but one that I think can be solved easily enough. The Gentech data model supports dividing your research into separate projects. Although they were seemingly designed for entirely self- contained areas of research, what's interesting is that these projects do not need to be self contained. It would be easy enough to use them as a way of dividing research into separate areas to which different settings could be applied. That way I can apply different settings to my English, Irish, German and Jèrriais ancestors. > More, I'm not sure you can call a rule with enough > exceptions to fit a "rule", fuzzy or not, because > eventually, fuzzy logic loses its logic. Now you're just arguing about semantics. Would you be happier if I used the term "cultural norm" instead of "fuzzy rule"? Whatever you call them, they're potentially useful. I want my genealogy program to draw it to my attention if I have a sixty-year-old woman giving birth. Certainly it's not impossible, but it's sufficiently unusual that I want alerting to it. Richard