jack writes:
| BarFly needs ! too. You can presumably use it to detect when a line
| has been completed without there being a barline at the end. Which
| would make those of us who want to write open-ended lines very happy.
Not sure I follow this. Why is ! needed at all? Standard ABC has a
perfectly usable and intuitive way of saying whether a staff ends
with a bar line. If there's a | at the end of the line, there's a bar
line at the end of the staff. If not, not. What could be simpler?
What does ! add to this other than puzzlement over what that weird
character is doing there?
| It would also make me happy because using ! in mid-line helps me
| resolve the conflict between writing ABC in a manner optimized for
| source readability and having it laid out sensibly on the printed page.
Could you explain this? I don't know what ! in mid-line means. It
certainly doesn't seem to add anything to readability. It's just a
noise character. I've seen lots of well-laid-out abc that uses lots
of spaces for readability. I don't think any of it has ever used ! at
all. So what does it contribute?
| Obviously not many people yet care about having their source readable,
That's for sure!
| but as ABC matures there are going to be an increasing number of people
| for whom it is their first musical notation - like blind users - and
| the kind of ABC they're going to want to use is the legibly-laid-out
| variety.
True. But experience so far shows that only a few users care about
readability. This probably won't change much. I've found that it's
pretty easy to write little scripts in various languages to do a bit
of reformatting. This is probably a more reliable approach in the
long run.
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