Terms for rotations

Garth Wallace gwalla at gmail.com
Fri Nov 7 16:39:58 CST 2014


Hello,

I'm currently working towards a proposal to encode a set of symbols
used in fairy chess and chess variants, and I have a question about
naming conventions. Several of the symbols are rotations of already
encoded symbols. According to the FAQ, "turned" is preferred for 180°
rotations, and "rotated" for 90° rotations, but "rotated" is mabiguous
as to whether the rotation is clockwise or counterclockwise, and in
this set the two directions are treated as semantically distinctive.
"Clockwise" and "antilockwise" appear in the code charts to be used
only for curved arrows. Arrows seem to make use of "upwards",
"leftwards", "rightwards", and "downwards", but these symbols are not
arrows and do not really have a *direction*, just an orientation.

It's even more unclear when it comes to intermediate rotations in 45°
increments (I'm not sure if I will include these in any proposal; I'm
still doing research, gathering evidence of use and determining my
scope). Arrows seem to use ordinal compass directions (e.g. NORTH EAST
ARROW), but again these are not arrows. The names FAQ is silent on
this.

I'm leaning towards "turned", "left rotated", and "right rotated" for
the cardinal orientations, and have no idea what (if anything) to do
about intermediate ones. Are there any more or less official
preferences?



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