On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 08:47:59PM +0000, John Chambers wrote: > I. Oppenheim writes: > | > | I think this broken continuation mechanism of the Old > | Standard is one of the most serious design mistakes in > | the whole ABC notation system. > | > | Should we continue to support it, or should we change > | the standard to be more sane---giving up backward > | compatibility? Maybe we should have a vote on this > | issue? > > We should classify the old scheme(s) as a minor mistake, > and correct it in the official standard. Then it will > finally be clear how programs should implement it, and > programs that skip lines to find the continuation will > simply be buggy. But it's an easy bug to fix.
I'd vote for that. > (And we'll still have the even more minor problem caused by > the fact that some programmers will replace the '\' with a > space, while others will delete it plus the newline, > causing the two lines to be joined without a separator. > This is a problem that still plagues several programming > languages. It's made worse by the fact that there's no > logical solution; both ways work equally well. Quandaries > like this are almost impossible for a group of humans to > ever solve. ;-) I suggest that the second works slightly better than the first, since it allows the possibility of writing a long group of beamed notes over more than one line, in the remote and unlikely event that anybody'd want to do that. -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
