Simon Wascher wrote: >James Allwright wrote: >> > You are right, there is no satisfying solution for it and this is a >> > shame. On the other hand it could simply and instantainously be done by >> > implementing a DA: = dance field into the header. Since there is no such >> > field, it cannot make any existing abc's outdated, and since it is not >> > active, I belive it could be used from now on. >> Sorry, this won't work. You can only have 1 character before the colon, >> otherwise you are going to have lots of parsers complaining. > >It is a pity if it is that way. And my copy of barfly did not complain >on a first try.
Unlike most programs, BarFly does not parse the header line by line. Instead it searches for the fields which it needs (K:, M:, L: Q:) and ignores anything else in between. So if we did decide at some point to introduce two-letter fields it would be relatively easy to do, as long as they were confined to the header. >So its definitely something which the actuall programs rely on ? In my >simple mind the rule could also have been: accept (between linebreak >linebreak X: and the first K:) as a header what is between a line break >and the next colon. > >I see it: > >[from the standard:] > >...that any line beginning with a letter in the range A-Z and >immediately followed by a : is interpreted as a field... > >...archive fields do not affect the output at all... > >- > >(practically as long as "fields" with two letters are restricted to the >header area and use just those letters used in archive fields they >could not do any harm. The question then would be if any indexing >application would support it. >I am willing to change the standard if it does no harm to actuall >programs and therefore existing abc files) I think you will meet with a lot of opposition from people whose programs parse the header line by line and produce an error message when meeting an illegal line. On the other hand, there is a clear demand for new field types, and very few single letters left, so perhaps we should consider it. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
