Bryan Creer writes: | John Chambers wrote - | >Of course, there's a very real fear that once something gets into a | >standard, there will be social pressure to implement it. ;-) | | Why would something be in the standard if nobody wanted it? If people wanted | it, why shouldn't it be in the standard? The social pressure would come from | users who wanted the functionality. A standard would just help everybody to | agree on what "it" was.
Geez; there's always someone who will respond seriously to a joke! Anyhow, with music notation, there is a fairly serious problem of radically different needs for different kinds of music. This has prevented agreement in the past, and will continue to do so. As for implementation, there is the general problem of a developer who responds "Who needs that stupid feature?" This is because he/she doesn't play any of the sort of music that needs it. This is the origin of the limitation to only first and second endings with much abc software. The early users were mostly involved with British Isles music, where multiple endings are rarely needed, and third endings are hardly ever seen at all. In those styles, things like :|2,4 are not worth implementing, since you'll never use them. Note again that this is a case where you could argue that the current abc "standard" permits such endings. Chris's 1.6 doc was sketchy, as you'd expect for someone working with English and Irish folk music. He mentioned endings, and gave exactly one example with a first and second ending. He didn't say (or even imply) that this was all that was legal, but a lot of implementers wrote code that rejects :|3 and other endings. They probably did this without even thinking about it, because who needs such things? And now we've gone through years of discussing the topic, with a few of us implementing more cases. But even if we were to produce an official standard that requires endings like :|[2,4 we'd probably find that it would be years before most programs implemented more than the 1.6 "standard", because who needs it? | >the abc2win use of '!' ... | >the !foo! thingies that have been proposed for ornaments and | >other annotations. These two uses are somewhat in conflict. | | Of course, if whichever of these came first had been included in a standard | the conflict would never have arisen. Jim was writing abc2win in the early days of abc, long before the rest of us knew what was up. Talk about a "standard" was years in the future. It was an informal effort involving a handful of musicians who were also programmers. Criticising them for not doing a standards effort is hardly appropriate. You don't form a standards committee when you're writing software for your own use or to share with a few friends. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
