> As far as I know, only abc2win has so far used ! as a line terminator, > and the !...! extensions already exist in the 1.7.6 "draft standard",
Which is not much more than a renamed absm2ps manual. > which most people on this list seem to agree should be the starting > point for the new 2.0.0 standard. If some bits of it are thrown out first. > If this happens, I see several options for abc2win: This is the wrong way to look at it. abc2win is barely being maintained, but tunes created with its aid are the largest single corpus on the web. It's the tunes you need to care about, not the software. >1) Keep ! as a line terminator and don't implement the !...! > extensions. This would make abc2win a "nonstandard" implementation. It already is in many respects. The problem is mainly a pragmatic one (though as I have been arguing, having ! as a line terminator allows important things you can't do any other way). >3) Use another character for either the escape character for either > extensions (e.g., +...+ instead of !...!) or as a line terminator. > This would also make abc2win a "nonstandard" implementation, and > would definitely break some (possibly many) existing ABC files. There are very few existing files using the abcm2ps !...! construct compared with the number that use ! as a terminator. And since the uses of this construct are finitely enumerable, there is no reason why abcm2ps (or some utility supporting it) can't auto-edit them into something else. Since any ABC can occur between two terminators, it would be much harder for abc2win to change its behaviour, or for a utility to transform them automatically, even if the implementor wanted to do such a thing (not likely). > I think having a unique forced line break character may well be > useful enough to warrant using one of them. What would folks think > of using & for this purpose? Look at the example I just gave. The reason ! worked so well for it was because it's visually unobtrusive. & isn't. Better to let abcm2ps have & for whatever it wants to do with a new character, since source readability doesn't seem to be an issue for people who use it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
