Phil, I seem to recall that you had an alternate proposal - can you resurrect it? I'm almost at the point of implementing this in Skink, so it would be useful to have the proposals side-by-side.
wil Phil Taylor wrote: > 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 To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
