On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Bob Archer wrote:
> We have to be at some point on the sliding scale between the two extremes,
> and that involves balancing things off against each other. In particular we
> seem to have "usefulness as an exchange mechanism" pitted directly against
> "allows programmers to innovate" at the moment - the classic dilemma for
> all standards.
I cant help thinking how thinks are working over at the GNU/LilyPond
people. They have a language that seems to be in quite heavy
evolution. The programmers change the language at will while working on
the development version (this sounds chaotic, it's not at all that
bad). So to fix that they have a language-converting-script included in
that distribution which can convert files between version (or maybe only
to newer versions??). Anyway for this to work you need to use the \version
construct in you music code.
Maybe it has been said before, but this suggest another approach to the
multible version of on language problem. I don't know much about
the implementation of the available abc prgrams. but one solution could be
that each abc programmer supplied conversion to and from some central
feature rich language (like lilyponds "mudela"). These algoritms could be
fitted in one conversion tool which would solve the probmels of abc
genrated with program X doesn't work with program Y.
The downside could off course be that this would tempt programmers the
care even less about conforming to the abc standard. But since this is
already the case to some degree, it might be worth giving a thought.
That said I know it's not me who's gonna spend my time implementing that
conversion tool, so it's easy for my suggest, but here it is...
--
Atte Andr� Jensen
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