> I wonder, if at some point in the future, the committe who establishes > the abc standard might not consider an alternative to ascii text as a > file format. I know on first glance there are those who will shudder and > scream, but why not. If a standard was created that could not be edited > in a text editor, these problems go away. Filesize could still be kept > down. The only concession would be that all editing would have to be > done inside an 'abc' editor.
Which would put an obligation on you to create multi-platform ABC tools that were better for every conceivable ABC-related purpose than any text tools anybody might have... BarFly is okay as an editor but it's hardly up there with BBEdit or Nisus Writer, so for some tasks I edit ABC with those. If I were running Unix I could make the same argument about Emacs and the whole suite of text- processing filters that Unix provides (you have five minutes to implement a utility that will count the number of tune titles in a directory... using "find", "wc", and "sed" or "awk", you can do that in a one-liner). If I had a more current Mac I'd be using Sherlock to index ABC; think you could produce a search utility that would work better? Text is also futureproof. There is lots of absolutely dreadful ABC out there written years ago to fit currently unsupported legacy apps like abc2win or abc2mtex; on BarFly it produces garbage output, or may not even be recognizable as ABC. But since it's text I can edit it and fix the problem. A structured format would make it impossible to get behind the garblement to see the writer's intentions. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
