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FAQs
 

Ceder Square Dance System (CSDS) ==> Sequences

Parsing bug?
In the following sequence that our caller gave us for a workshop session:

Heads: Pass The Sea,
Jay: Touch 1/4,
Centers: Single Polly Wally,
Rims Trade: Reach Out,
Centers: Reverse Explode,
Split Catch Mix 2,
Invert The Column 1/2,
Explode The To,
Plan Ahead,
Centers: Veer Left,
Jay: Swap Around,
Interlocked Little,
1/4 The Deucey,
Snap The Lock,
Trip The Set,
Split Swap & Roll,
In Roll Circulate,
R.L.G.

As you can see, the 8th call was [mis-]typed as "Explode The To" [sic].

Of course, he meant "Explode the Top".

I assumed that CSDS would blow up on the sequence -- however, it let it go through, which surprised me.

Something was obviously wrong. So I started playing with it, and it turns out that instead of doing an "Explode the Top", the program just performed an "Explode". Seems to be a bizarre parsing bug, perhaps matching the substring (all but the last "p" character) to the extent of treating the string as permissible input, but then not resolving to the correct node. (?)

It would be fine if the program offered a warning/error message, but simply performing a different call than was entered is really easy to miss if you aren't keeping an eagle eye on the formation diagrams.

Not a likely/common error to happen, but it is an embarrasment "waiting to happen" for a caller eventually...

CSDS has a set of 'garbage' words that it ignores when parsing. This set includes words such as 'do', 'the', 'a', 'an', and 'to'. If a parse error occurs on a line, and the only errors are garbage words, then CSDS ignores the error. That is what happened on 'Explode the to'. It found 'Explode' plus two legal garbage words.

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