John Chambers writes:
>Going back to || or [| isn't a very good idea. It's common practice
>to use double bars to mark the "major phrases" within a section, and
>they are (almost) never used as repeat boundaries. The code should go
>back to |: or the start of the tune. We oughta state this in the ABC
>standard docs. This would both answer the question, and make life
>easier for implementers.
>
There's a backwards-compatibility problem here: the [| and |]
constructs came relatively late in the life of abc---in abc 1.6, I think,
since my copy of abc2mtex 1.5 chokes on both. The result is that there are
a lot of tunes out there (well...in my collection, at least; while I don't
know about anybody else's, it's a pretty safe bet that there are plenty)
which use || instead of |]. Of course I could re-edit most of them by a
global search-and-replace, (at the price of a few unpleasant surprises) but
I don't want to, since I want to be able to print them with my favorite
legacy app.
James Allright writes:
>I think it is reasonable to require |: at the start of a repeat section
>and issue a warning if it has been missed out. By "require", I mean that
>a player program might ignore the end repeat if there is no start repeat
>and just play once through.
>
I can live with that. However, having the player program go back to
the beginning of a tune whenever there's no begin-repeat would be a serious
bug IMHO. (And it would be nice to be able to turn the warnings off. Come
to think of it, that seems like a good general design feature: warnings tell
the user that there's something there which is neither correct nor a
disaster. They're very useful, but if the user--mea culpa--already knows
that that his or her practice is frowned upon, and is pig-headed enough to
insist on using it anyway, the warnings become annoying, and he or she'll be
better-disposed toward the program if it's possible to turn off the source
of annoyance.)
Cheers,
John Walsh
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