Jean-Francois Moine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> mentions:
| John Chambers a skrivas:
| [snip]
| > before or after a |. The abbreviation :: may be used for :|:, i.e., a
| > combined end-repeat and start-repeat in the middle of a staff.
|
| I see ::, but no :|: in the actual standard/draft. Do we have to
| implement it?
Good point. Something that has been mentioned before that I think is
a good idea: Redundant bar lines should generally be reduced without
comment. This is already done in some cases by abc2ps. Thus, if one
line ends with :| and the next starts with |:, and you've used the -c
option (meaning to ignore line endings and generate staff breaks
automagically), the pair is reduced to ::. Similarly, :: will be
rewritten as :|\n|: if that's where a staff break ends up. There are
a lot of abc files around with endings like :|| and :|], which aren't
strictly legal by the current standard, but probably should be made
legal. I saw a case of :|: earlier today in another mailing list. So
:|: and :||: should be accepted as meaning the same as :: (which
should probably be considered an abbreviation).
The best justification is the old advice to be liberal in what you
accept and conservative in what you produce. The other form of this
argument is that it makes life easier for programmers in the long
run. A lot of abc has been and will be generated by software. The
programmer's job is made a lot easier if you can do things like just
produce :| at the end of a repeat without the routine knowing what
comes next. This will tend to produce :||: in the naive case.
Requiring the program to reduce this to :: is a needless complication
that wastes many programmer hours. The abc can't just be produced; it
must be accumulated in memory and examined for possible rewritings
like this. It's far more efficient to just output the simple abc, and
then chew these things up during input and do the reduction there.
There's also the fact that abc isn't just a computer code. It is
written and read by humans. Many of them are musicians with very poor
understanding of the needs of software. Current practice shows that
they do generate all sorts of "reasonable" abc. Life would be easier
for everyone if the software were also reasonable about such things.
You may think that it makes extra work for the programmer, but that
bit of extra work saves everyone a lot of hand-editing to correct the
abc from non-expert users (or users of software that produces such
non-standard abc).
| > |: ... | ... |[1,3 ... :|[2,4 ... :|
| > |::: ... | ... |[1,3 ... :|[2,4 ... :|
...
| Right, over 45 years of my music life, I never saw such a notation!
Where've you been, boy? I've seen it a lot. I would say, though, that
it's notation mostly used and liked by dance musicians. One of the
real problems with a lot of printed music is following the repeats.
I've seen a lot of cases of a piece of music falling apart and dying
because the musicians can't find the start of a repeat or
misunderstand how many times to play a phrase. If you're reading
music that has been put up on a stand, it helps a lot if the repeats
are VERY clearly marked. So experienced dance musicians will write
the |::: to give the reader advance warning that this is the start of
a four-times repeat. The bar line(s) will typically also be very
thick, and together with the three colons, it gives you a mark that's
easy to spot in a fraction of a second. Most musicians not working
under such pressure don't know or care about such things, but some of
us know about it and consider it valuable. And it's so easy to
implement ...
| OK for me, I will just ignore these multiple colons instead of adding
| dashed bars! BTW, could these last ones (simple colon) be the new
| standard?
Not sure what you're saying here. In a case like |:: ... ::|, the
colons are not extra. This means three times through, and there's no
other common notation for it. Ignoring the extra colons in such cases
is simply wrong.
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