On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Jack Campin wrote: > > 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.
and then a huge amount of abc usage would go away, too. Many people see it as one of the most useful things about abc, that it can be edited using <insert favourite text editor>. > 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... FIVE MINUTES ? Eee, luxury ... Grep "^T:" *.abc | wc -l and time left over to brew a pot of tea. > 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. Yes. This has all the disavadvantages of its advantages. I'm feeling sour at the moment - I want to do some fiddling about with the body of VMP tunes, most of which come from abc2win. The number of ways this output has of blowing up rest-of-the-world tunes is quite remarkable, and is wasting whole days out of my life. Has anybody succeeded in writing a translator ? -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
