I have been wondering about this all since I first come across abc, but I haven't figured it out yet and I have never thought of asking until now. Anyway:
Is there a good reason why the X: field is required? * It is not nessecary to separate the tunes since an empty line is used for that purpose. * It is of no "musical" use for a reader/parser * Since its context is very small (file-specific), the X: number cannot be used as a tune ID, since other tunes in other files may have the same number. * "Inline tunes" (tunes sent by e-mail etc) often lacks the X: field. This shows, I think, not the lazyness of the writers, but rather that the X: field has no meaning to them. If I e-mail a single tune, why do I have to enumerate it? If I copy it from an abc collection, I might want the X: field to remain, but I'm not talking about abolishing it: I'm talking about making it non-required. * Merging abc files often creates X: doublettes. IMHO, there is no reason at all to have X: as a required field in abc. Again, it may have a good use, but why _required_? BTW, changing this will not change the compability with any existing abc files. Erik __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
