Atte wrote: | On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, John Chambers wrote: | > Atte wrote: | > | >> !fine! exclamation-point abuse | > | > This reminds me: There has been a bit of discussion of this syntax | > off and on over the years. Some people have implemented it. Could | > people post information on which abc apps accept this syntax? | | abcm2ps
That's the only reply that I've seen. Is this the only abc program that understands the !foo! annotation syntax? (Well, actually, my jcabc2ps clone does, too, so that's two abc2ps clones. Not what you'd call an overwhelmingly positive response.) If so, I'm disappointed. I sorta recall that there was quite a discussion of this on several occasions, and a lot of people seemed to think it was a Good Idea. Some recent messages implied that some people thought the issue had been settled and this syntax adopted. But the shortage of replies to my question imply that this isn't true at all. Of course, it did also get mixed up with the concept of macros, since a lot of people prefer 1-char abbreviations for such things. And macros turn out to be so complex that most people give up in bewilderment after reading a few messages on the subject. I don't think I'd want to try to implement any of the things I read; I'm certain I'd do it wrong. But the !foo! notation itself seems simple. And a header line that says something like m:q=!foo! seems like it would be trivial to implement. I wonder if it would be possible to get general agreement on something simple like this, and leave parameterized macros for a future discussion. (Of course, if past history is any clue, what will happen is that a few people will declare that macros that just do string substitution are not nearly powerful enough to solve all the world's problems, and another discussion of obscure macro implementations will follow, with the result that everyone else will killfile the topic and the idea of a basic substitution macros will once again die on the vine. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
