Bryan Creer writes: | Mike Whitaker said - | >On Tuesday 16 April 2002 02:04 am, John Chambers wrote: | >> And we don't | >> need to wait for an official published standard to fix it; the syntax | >> is obvious and easy to implement. | > | >Not wishing to 'have a go', as it were. But isn't this WHY ABC has so many | >different variations, none of which can read all of each others files? | | Yes, indeed! If abc is to be used as a means of exchanging tunes it works | better if we all agree on what the letters, numbers, dots and squiggles mean | and that this information is held in some central, accessible place. If | "standard" sounds too authoritarian for you, call it something else. I've | suggested "protocol".
Nice in theory, but in practice that's not how standards work. This topic first came up several years ago. Most everyone seems to agree that it would be a Good Thing (except for those who just say "Who needs it?" ;-) Despite this, nothing meaningful has happened to get it into any standard. All the proposed standards just copy Chris's original sketchy description. If we wait until it's in a published standard, we'll all die of old age first, and we'll all be limited forever to the most minimalist interpretation of Chris's 1.6 "standard". I needed it years ago. I implemented it years ago. There's no way any of you can stop me from using my own code. If you don't like it, you don't have to use my code or my abc files. And if you do like it, you're welcome to both. So there! Nyah, Nyah! ;-) (Seriously, this is historically how most industry standard have been developed. The committee approach takes forever and produces legalistic documents that few implementers can understand. Meanwhile, programmers build things that work, users start using them, and eventually they come to the attention of the standards committees. This is much faster and produces things that are provably implementable. For example, C was widely used for several decades, and went through a lot of extensions, before the ANSI C standard was finally published. Unix was running on around 40% of the world's cpus by the time the POSIX standard was published. Perl and tcl are part of the industry's set of major languages, and there are still no official standards for them. And so on.) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
