Another John wrote: | In abc, there is even less ambiguity, because ties and slurs have distinct | syntaxes. ^F-|=F is utter nonsense (according to the draft standard), and | should be written as (^F|=F) instead. And if ^F-|=F is nonsense, then it | is equally nonsensical for abc software to interpret ^F-|F that way.
We do have a practical problem here. It seems that most ABC software casually accepts ties between unequal notes and and draws the obvious slur between them. I haven't used many of the players, but I'd guess that many of them do the same, and play the second note with no attack. As a result, there's a lot of ABC around that uses '-' as a way of saving one keystroke when you want to slur two notes. This may be a violation of the current standard, but since a lot of software accepts it (and most musicians can't tell the difference), it has been used a lot. This was something that I noticed some time back while doing some experimenting with my Tune Finder. Since I added the ability to return tunes in PS, GIF, MIDI and other formats, I've also seen some of the problems caused by variant ABC. This was actually what encouraged me origially to start my own abc2ps clone. Rather than contend with a slowly growing flood of complaints that my code did something crazy with a particular tune, I thought that I should start working on making it accept all the common ABC that's lying about on the Net. This makes it more useful as well as eliminating complaints. I have no control over what people put on their web sites, so I have a strong incentive to use "Be liberal in what you accept" as a major rule. This particular thing never caused problems, because abc2ps has always been casual about the tie/slur distinction, as are most musicians. But I have noted how common this misuse of ties actually is. If we decree that this is illegal and no longer allowed, a lot of people will be complaining about software that can't handle tunes that "used to work just fine". I, for one, will react to such a clause in any future standard by casually ignoring it. I don't want to waste my time responding to users' complaints about my web site bombing for ABC that works elsewhere. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
