On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, John Chambers wrote:
> |
> | X:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ...
> | abc2ps complains, but that's all. They all rip the file ok.
> |
> | But I bet there are other programs that won't ... ?
>
> Probably, but rejecting such a tune isn't reasonable, and
> should be fixed. Giving a warning is reasonable. One idea
> might be to insert a % after the last digit, and then every
> abc program should accept it. The worry then would be
> programs that strip off comments and don't pass them on.
>
> There are a lot of examples of software that casually
> accepts trailing junk in numbers without comment. Strings
> like "5cm" and "17.3km" are routinely accepted in a lot of
> programming languages, for obvious reasons. "X:0100ABCD"
> should be ok for the same reasons, though you'd expect
> programs to treat it as "X:100".
Which is an argument against hex numbers, this is only acceptable if X:
has no meaning. OTOH, I have no particualr argument _for_ them, except
that I want a scheme with a fixed number of characters, and more room.
> One thing I oughta check: I have a number of perl scripts
> that, among other things, renumber the tunes in a file. I
> should verify that they don't lose such trailing text.
> Keeping it would be easy, but discarding the old X line and
> generating a new one is even easier.
Mmm. I think this convinces me to invent a new %%ID line rather than using
X: - what I'm looking for is a way to pin a fixed ID onto each tune in my
web collection, so that I can use it to generate a URL that will stay the
same regardless of how I might re-organise the files, add in new tunes,
etc. Obviously, I'd like that to stay with the tune rather than getting
changed by other peoples' re-numbering schemes (or, indeed, my own).
--
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem
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