John Chambers wrote: >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.)
You can probably add jaabc2ps too, since that whole !foo! mess was JA's idea. >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. This person has always thought it a very bad idea. I've argued against it at great length on many occasions. In fact, it's the main barrier to general acceptance of the draft 1.7 standard; take that out and I'll vote for acceptance of the rest of it. Needless to say, BarFly doesn't support it. >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. It is inextricably mixed up with macros, because that's the way that the idea was framed. >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. Sure. Just leave out the bangs - they are utterly unnecessary. >(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. ;-) Basic substitution macros are very useful, they don't stop you from going on to deal with macros which know to transpose (which are even more useful). Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
