Let me throw in my support for advisory accidentals in parentheses. It's clearly intuitive--pretty obvious to someone who's reading abc, even without looking documentation. John Chambers' ([EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed, 15 Nov 2000 09:07:45 -0800) mention of optional slurs and optional chords reminded me of something else: Some rather long time ago, there may have been (is my memory failing me?) a mention of optional notes, which are often surrounded by parentheses in printed music (an optional anacrusis, for example). Now, we can't of course use parentheses for this, since it would be ambiguous with phrasing marks. Should abc have notation for optional notes? What could be used? One obvious solution would be to "escape" the parentheses, ala unix-style regular expressions \(...\) Computer programmers wouldn't have any trouble with this, but I doubt that your average musician would find it intuitive. The other delimiters are used up, I think. One could put a question mark before the opening paren ?(...) Of course, this would conflict the John Chambers' proposal for optional _slurs_. Another solution would be to notate alternatives explictly, say, using the vertical stroke (again, as in regex). The problem here again is scope, and we're back needing delimiters. I realize that optional notes create problems for player programs. When used in printed music, their interpretation depends on the musical sense of the performer. Robert Bley-Vroman Honolulu To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
