Phil Taylor writes: | Forgeot Eric wrote: | | >concerning repeats, will it be possible into the new abc standard | >to have more than two repeats in a song ? And how about repeats | >like |: blabla '-1.3 blabla :| '-2 blabla :| '- 4 etc... || ? | | Yes, it's been proposed several times, and I think quite a lot of people | would find it useful. It's very easy to make it work in a display program, | but a bit of a nightmare for players.
Since I implemented endings [3, [4, ... and endings like [1-3 and [2,4 in my abc2ps clone a few years ago, I've been using it quite a lot. I've also seen abc from other people that use this, so presumably someone else has implemented it. Anyone know who? It is pretty easy in a program that only needs to display the music. One of the real frustrations with the original abc2ps that allowed only first and second endings was that the only way to get the common |[1,3 ... :|[2,4 repeat pattern was to write |[1 ... :|[2 ... :|, which is enough of a clue to people who are aware of it. But if you have a crowd of people reading the music, a lot of them can be trusted to treat that :| as an obvious typo, since the ending brackets clearly say to play it only twice. So they just barge ahead, with disastrous results. Using the conventional "1,3" and "2,4" to mark the endings is a good way to prevent such disasters. One funny thing is that, if you read the 1.6 "spec", you'll see that Chris didn't say that only first and second endings are legal. He merely mentioned the syntax, and gave an example with a first and second ending. Somehow, a lot of programmers took this as permission to not bother implementing anything else. It's as if a programming language spec defined arithmetic operations, gave one example of addition and multiplication, and the programmers concluded that they didn't need to implement subtraction or division. Of course, Chris is mostly involved in British Isles folk music, and if you look through books of that sort of music, you'll rarely see anything other than first and second endings. I have O'Neill's on the shelf ... Yup; when I opened it at random, neither page had any such endings at all. I had to look six pages before I found a single example with first and second endings. This is typical, so it's not surprising that Chris just casually mentioned the topic. But for a lot of other kinds of music, this is a serious problem. And we don't need to wait for an official published standard to fix it; the syntax is obvious and easy to implement. OTOH, what does that '-1.3 notation mean? I've never seen a negative repeat indicator. I wouldn't try to guess its meaning. And the use of the apostrophe isn't at all obvious. It's not in current abc, and doesn't seem to correspond to anything in printed music. Is this some interesting notation that I should learn about? To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
