Rick says: | Exactly. I have used your Tune Finder, John, and the X-number aspect of it many, |many times to tell if the different versions listed were the same or not. | | I guess my question about changing this would be is there a really compelling reason |to change it? It seems to be useful.
My conclusion is that X index fields should always be used in files with more than one tune, but the "standard" (such as it is) should be relaxed to allow omitting X, at least in single-tune files. This is in line with current practice, and isn't really much of a programming problem. It makes recognizing the start of a tune a bit more involved. The code has to accept either X: or T: as starting an ABC tune, and default the index to 1 if no X: line was seen. This is a bit more complex than just matching "X:", but it's not what you'd call an onerous burden on any programmer. Code that generates ABC should always generate X: lines, of course. But the conventional "user friendliness" argument says that it shouldn't be required in the input when there's only one tune. History has shown that we in fact can't persuade users to include the X: line in files such as email messages. Hollering and stamping our feet isn't very persuasive. A better approach is to persuade the much smaller population of ABC programmers that they should relax the rule to handle what naive users insist on doing anyway. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
