Whoops!

A favourite quotation of Edgar Dijkstra is that 'testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs'. This is very true. In Australian homes too you can squash a few cockroaches and think you've got them all, but how do you know there isn't a whole colony hiding in the skirting boards? I'm guilty of putting in a '!' when I shouldn't have. My only explanation was that I was jetlagged in Montreal and fed up with preparing my presentation. For some reason I put in that 'not', which prevented nmerge from finding any left-side transpositions at all. All I can say is: 'Whoops!'

I'll fix it in the next hour or so and upload the new version as 1.0.2, and update Alpha too. The transposition algorithm is not perfect - I never said so, if you read the Balisage paper, particularly at the end - but it is workable. One thing you should keep in mind is that this is a unique program in its field. Several people have written merging programs for humanistic texts, and a couple have even included transpositions (MEDITE, JNDiff). But only between two texts at a time. I merge N texts into one digital representation.

One thing I'd like to do soon is make it find transpositions in groups (a flaw that Peter Robinson rightly pointed out). And it could be even faster, if I can work out how to parallelise the algorithm. That's why I 'built' this fancy i7 computer.

The good thing about computing variants automatically rather than manually is that it is not final. Any improvements in the algorithm are immediately visible. Whereas making systematic changes to a manually coded set of texts with complex variants is not trivial.