Ewan A. Macpherson wrote: | John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | > There were suggestions that the allowed chars include '+' and 'x', | > and I did include them in my implementation. I don't remember what | > the 'x' was supposed to mean; does anyone know? | | Andrew Baker and I had proposed a syntax in which xN meant to play a | particular block of material N times *within* a repeat. Thus you could | have | | |: AA |[1x2,3x5 BB :|[2x3 CC || | | This would be truly useful if we could get away from the idea that | "conditional material" occurs only in endings. In piobaireachd, a | section which plays | | | AA | AA | BB | AA | BB | BB | AA | BB || | | is generally put on the page as | | |:: ["twice first time" AA] | ["twice second time" BB] ::| | | i.e. | | |:: [1x2,2,3 AA] | [1,2x2,3 BB] ::|
Aha! It makes sense now. I've verified that my jcabc2ps clone isn't bothered by this, and produces the correct output. Of course, it would be a bit trickier for an abc player, which would actually have to understand what it all means. This is probably another case of my earlier comment to the effect that people who say "Who needs that?" should be ignored. I didn't really understand what this was about the first time, but it was easy enough to implement, so I did. It's another example of normal notation among a small crowd of musicians, which is unknown to most others. To motivate implementers, it helps a lot if you can give some specific examples and explain what they mean. This still won't much motivate implementers who are only interested in their own music, but it will motivate those who are curious about unfamiliar music. BTW, I think the spacing in this example isn't really quite right. In the case of repeats and endings, the brackets chars are really logically more like a bar line, unlike the [CDGc] chord notation, where they are grouping chars associated with the notes. So I think it would be better if written |::[1x2,2,3 AA ]|[1,2x2,3 BB ]::| This helps avoid the confusion with chord notation, and makes it more obvious that the brackets are for flow of control rather than for binding a group of notes. I'd probably also say that all the spaces should be optional, but we should teach people that such spaces are a good idea if you want your abc to be readable. Another problem is a shortage of characters ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
