At 07:39 PM 04-18-2002 +0000, John Chambers you wrote: >I've also been contemplating solving the need for random text such as >"last time" under an ending bracket. This obviously needs quotes, and >has syntax problems after a bar line. What I think would work is to >say that you must use the '[' in this case, and you can then write > |: CEC DED |1-3 EGE FAF :|2,4 EFG FED :|["last time" EFG ABc :|
I'm one of the people that feels that ABC should be able to be used to unambiguously describe a piece of music without the need for human intelligence to interpret it. As such, for the case of "last repeat has a special variant", I don't think an arbitrary text string method is the right solution (it may be right for other things, but not for information on how to play the music). I would suggest that there be a special code used for things like that, such as a repeat-number beginning with '0x', (like 0xlast, 0xfirst, etc) that could be used to indicate alternate endings under special cases. Done right, it could be extensible to newer repeat patterns as needed in the future. This would not prevent a program that converts ABC to standard notation (like abc2ps) from printing "last time" instead of 0xlast, or whatever. That would be the proper thing to do, since that's how that feature of music is implemented. It would also be useful, either in the repeat notation or in the P: field notation to be able to specify "repeat an arbitrary number of times". For various dance music, it would be very nice to be able to easily specify "start with an intro consisting of the last measure of part B voice 1 played once, then parts A, A, and B repeated in that order an arbitrary number of times, with on the final repeat of B, an alternate ending to end. For human players, "arbitrary" is up to them. For machine players, "arbitrary" could be 3, 4, 5, 1000, or "until the user hits a key, indicating last repeat". >To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: >http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
