At 07:04 PM 2/1/2002 EST, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >You can argue about ^F-|F till the cows come home. Jack Campin's proposal >for the Q: command seemed to reach some sort of satisfactory conclusion and >then vanished. John Chambers has proposed all sorts of interesting ideas. >Until you have some sort of mechanism for agreeing and implementing a >standard, all such discussion is futile.
At 06:07 PM 2/5/2002 +0000, Erik Ronstr�m wrote: >We shall supply a standard. Not just a standard, but a Standard, which >is 100% consistent, and states as clearly as possible what is allowed >and what is not. Abc applications (such as players and printers) should >try to keep as close to this standard as possible, but they may of >course use the application-defined symbols for their own use. >If abc is going to have a future, it must not divide into >context-dependent variants. This requires a consistent and strict >standard, which leaves no doubt about how what is allowed and what is >not, or how a certain thing shall be written. [ lot's of good stuff that Erik wrote snipped ] I agree entirely with Bryan and Erik. As far as I can tell development of the ABC standard has stalled completely. Development of various program's variants continues but the standard doesn't seem to be getting anywhere and I don't see any real possibility of it getting anywhere. At 04:09 AM 2/6/2002 UTC, John Chambers wrote: >What seems to have happened is more or less consistent with the past >work on abc. The (semi-official) standards committee started with the >idea that what it needed was a clear formulation of abc version 1.6 >as a standard, and has worked on codifying that. New features are to >be put off until the current standard is established. Of course, this >is of little relevance to people who need things not covered by >version 1.6, so those of us have continued on our merry way inventing >random extensions for our own use, and wondering if the standards >folks will ever catch up. I'd agree with this if the standards committee was actually producing anything at all, but as far as I can tell they're not. I don't think we've even been able to get a statement out of the committee as to whether the committee exists or not (which I guess is one of those questions where a non-answer also answers the question). Given that the 1.6 standard has been out for years and not been superceded my suspicion is that the standards folks will never catch up. Bob ---------------------------------------------------------- -- Bob Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
