Bryan Creer writes: | and from ABC Music Notation: History written by a certain John Chambers - ... | There is no mention that I can find of when the !...! notation was introduced | or when standard 1.7.6 was released as a draft but it looks as if abc2win has | a prior claim on "!". I don't see how Jim Vint can be accused of "gratuitous | violations" of a standard that didn't even exist.
Anyone have dates for these? | The fact is that both "!" as a line break and "!...!" are in use so let's | develop a no blame culture and work out how to get round it. More to the point, | can we try and work out a system to make sure we all know what others are | doing so this sort of thing doesn't happen in the future? One of the inherent problems with all software development by more than one small group is that people will try new ideas, often incompatible with each other, and then you get input using all of them. If caught early, and everyone is cooperative, it's easy to pick the winner and convert everyone else's files. But this isn't always what happens. In this case, we have an example of something that has been the bane of the computing industry since at least the late 1950s: Even if a lot of people agree on an "industry standard", people working on the market leader systems (IBM and then Microsoft) tend to simply ignore the standard. "We're the standard; all you nobodies can just follow our lead or you'll have a mess on your hands." And since the market leader usually doesn't fully document their "standard", anyone trying to follow them has a very difficult job. It took me a long time to grok what all those funny ! chars meant, because they weren't documented anywhere, and the information I could find was quite confusing. Were they line or staff terminators? Recent comments here still confuse the two, but to a programmer, this is important. I finally figured out they could just be ignored. Then the !...! notation came along. This wasn't surprising, because most abc users had never heard of abc2win's use of !, and there was no mention of it in any abc docs. ! was an unused character, so why not use it? This mess isn't always intended, especially when done by independents like Jim Vint. I think he just saw it as a bother and a waste of his time. But to others who can't read minds, it does often come across as the traditional arrogance of the market leader to industry standards. Well, at least in this case, there's a kludge that distinguishes the abc2win ! from the musical annotation !...! notation. And this is in the tradition of the computing industry too; kludges like that are how we usually handle the market leaders' violations of standards. BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the tunes that seemed to come from abc2win (because of the ! chars, or because they had a "% ... abc2win" comment). It came to between 9 and 10% of the tunes. It probably is the numeric leader (since the true leader is "tunes created using any of a zillion text editors"), but it's not anywhere approaching a majority. It would take less work to convert the abc2win tunes to the standard. The best way would be to produce a new abc2win that does the conversion automatically. If it has some useful new features (inline key changes, clefs, voices), it could be widely adopted, and the non-conforming tunes would slowly fade away. Anyone want the job? Maybe I should revive that code and do another count ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
