--------
John Atchley writes:
| ... You have as much right to use K:^f as he does to unilaterally
| decide that an exclamation point! is used for the end of a line (I think
| it's Barfly that does that, if not I apologize, Phil). ...
This reminds me: I've seen a lot trouble with line wrapping,
including with the ongoing sugggestions that my tune finder is
"broken" because it doesn't fix such problems. I've thought for some
time that the "end of line is end of staff" rule is something that we
could maybe work on ammending. I've seen a lot of abc with ! or * at
the end of lines, in addition to the standard backslash. But I'm not
at all sure what these other end-of-line marks might mean. Maybe it's
time to document them, with the idea of maybe sneaking one or more
into the standard. So what do they actually mean?
It seems to me that the real problem here is the ongoing battle with
the "line wrap daemon" that inserts newlines into email messages.
This is a notorious problem with emailing scripts of all sorts, of
course, and it pretty much garbages a lot of abc in the same way.
Much as we'd like to assasinate the turkeys who keep writing code
that inserts line feeds into messages, this isn't really a practical
solution, and it wouldn't stop the next generation of email
mis-implementers. So what we should consider is revising our
end-of-staff rules so that, like HTML, ABC completely ignores CR and
LF characters, and uses some punctuation to mean "end of staff".
This could possibly even be snuck in as a complete change of syntax.
The reasoning is that a lot of programs already have options to
ignore line feeds and generate staff breaks automagically. With
abc2ps, this is the -c option. So with abc2ps, the change would
amount to implementing a second "end of staff" symbol (which would be
merely some code duplication), and then making the -c behavior into
the default. Maybe an hour's work, far less time than I have already
sunk into fixing line-wrap problems.
But this is getting ahead of the issue. What would be nice now is a
good description of the alternative end-of-staff thingies that have
been implemented. What do they really mean? Should we push for the
next stage, of getting one of them incorporated into other abc tools?
Then we could proceed to the next stage, of documenting this new way
of ending staffs and encouraging people to use it. I'd write a little
perl script to go through all my abc and append it to lines that
don't end with a backslash.
This is a rather trivial bit of syntax, but it is a real problem that
we could fix with relatively little effort.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
