> What seems to have happened is that I and a few others pointed out > that we don't really have a serious problem with the two uses of ! > right now, because a simple heuristic can tell which meaning was used > in a tune. But some people misinterpreted this to mean that both > could be legal in the standard language. But using both in a single > tune is a parsing disaster.
Which could be avoided simply by having the !symbol! things (or such of them as we want to retain) use a different bracketing character. I want to be able to use ! as a linebreak in the very same pieces I want to process with abcm2ps (which is the only ABC application that can handle some of the stuff I've got). If !symbol! stays the only way I could do that would be by hacking the source and recompiling a version that used +symbol+ instead, creating a new dialect. The fraction of the ABC corpus that would need to be changed to fit a change of delimiter by abcm2ps is peanuts. abc2win is still in heavy use, and whatever other maintenance Jim does on it, he's hardly likely to allow it to become incompatible with new Windows releases, and it's not going to suddenly become incapable of handling the sort of basic melodies most ABC users still want to process, so !-linebreak tunes are going to keep coming for years. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
