I. Oppenheim wrote: | | We know you don't like it, but there are others who do | like the !...! notation, including myself. And since I | like your macro facility as well, I propose to include | both features in the upcomming ABC standard. | | Is that acceptable to you Phil? Do other people on this | list agree? | | Regarding the bangs, they are really necessary because | one should be able to insert symbols without first | assigning them to a macro. Yes, I know this looks ugly, | but only when a symbol is used numerous times is it | worthwile to first assign it to a macro. Phil, I hope | you can live with that.
It seems to me that in some cases, having the !...! in the abc is better than defining a single-char symbol. For example, !da Capo! is something that musicians understand, and if it's there in the abc, they'll know what to do. But if you replace it with a cryptic single-char symbol, they'll have to pause, locate the definition in the headers, they find their way back to continue reading. This strikes me as clumsy, and something that would seriously interfere with sight reading. Now, people who think that abc should always be translated to staff notation might wonder who would ever read abc directly. But there are, in fact, people who do this. Recall that Chris developed abc as a handwritten music notation before he wrote abc2mtex, and he read the abc directly because that was the only way to do it. I read it myself sometimes, because when I'm reading email and it contains a tune, that's faster than extracting the tune, converting to ps and starting gv. So I'd favor keeping the textual music annotations in the !...! format, and using single chars for ornaments used a lot in a piece of music. Even there, I wouldn't consider a U: line a great favor to readers. They'd have to first study the definitions in the header, and try to remember which is which when they encounter one in the abc. We need periodic reminders that abc was intended to be readable by mere humans, and this is one of its strengths. (Which reminds me - Do you know what's the longest English word with only one vowel? ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
