I have no problem with Bob Archer's interpretation of what I say. Keep up the good work. I would only add that of course I don't think abc is useless either as an exchange medium or in any other way, I am just afraid it will become so if it breaks up into a network of mutually incomprehensible dialects. That is what I think could happen if everybody goes off implementing their own ideas without proper reference to any other developments. There seems to be little enthusiasm for updating the standard so perhaps a halfway house would be useful. How about some sort of register of innovations with a complete specification of the syntax and an indication of which packages have implemented them. This would need to be held somewhere accessible such as the ABC homepage or the ABC Project. Once innovations acheived some critical mass in terms of adoption by other packages, they could be promoted to the standard. > If a new developer were to start writing a program to accept abc input now, > which version of abc should they accept as input? Should they stick to the > currently published standard? maybe the draft standard? Should they attempt > to handle all of the abc variants out there? (this would involve getting > the instructions for a number of different programs and finding out what > they accept). This is where I came in. I wrote my abc to Noteworthy converter by following the standard and it was fine.* Then I tried it out on real abc collections and it collapsed in a heap. This was partly due to non-standard innovations I didn't even know about and partly due to sloppy abc due to non-adherence to the standard. My suggestion above addresses the first and tightening up on error checking on both input and output for all packages could go a long way to tackling the second. Can't we promote a culture where getting it "right" matters? Bryan Creer *I must get it finished sometime, but Noteworthy have issued a new release since I started to add to the problems. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
