---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 13:58:14 +0100 From: Phil Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: I. Oppenheim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [abcusers] Re: abc and microtonality
I. Oppenheim wrote: >On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Georg Hajdu wrote: > >> The parsing of xml files seems more difficult, > >XML is very easy to parse: you can make use of several >free off-the-shelf parsers that either create a >complete document tree (DOM standard) or generate >parser events (SAX standard). Even if you write your own parser, as I did, it's easier than parsing abc. >Just have a look at http://xml.apache.org/ for one of >the available solutions. > >> > In abc the capital letters H..Z are reserved for >> > user-defined purposes. Software which supported >> > microtonal accidentals could make use of these. > >That is not a good idea. Several of these letters >(THLMPSO?) have already a predefined meaning. It would >be better to leave these letters free. Not true - the abc standard specifically makes these characters available for use. The "predefined meanings" are just a convenience for the most commonly-used symbols and are not completely consistent between programs. Any sensible program should allow the user to define them to mean anything the program is capable of interpreting. >> Now, what about some other ascii 128-255 characters? >> Are they supported by abc? > >That is also not a good idea. Chars 128-255 are not >defined by ASCII and have a different meaning depending >on the code page that you use on your computer. > >Using these chars would change ABC from a text format >into a binary format. I would agree with that. The problem is that many users just use them to mean whatever they mean on their own system, so they get used to represent charcters with diacritical marks, instead of using the TeX backslash escape sequences which are cross-platform. >I think the best solution would be to use the !...! >symbol notation to add extra symbols to the abc >language. Something like !sharp1!, !sharp2!, !sharp3! >etc. If the user so desires, he could bind these >symbols to some of the free letters, via the U: >mechanism. If you've been reading this list for any length of time, you probably know what I think of the !...! notation. If it's used without binding the meanings to single letters it makes the abc totally unreadable, and sensible programs don't need the exclamation marks in symbol definitions. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
