Guido Gonzato wrote:
>On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, I. Oppenheim wrote:
>
>> > m: ~n3 = n{o}n{m}n
>>
>> Phil, thank you for sharing this, this is a wonderful
>> idea! I strongly suggest to include this mechanism in
>> the upcomming standard. Guido, what do you think?
>
>My personl view is that extensions are always welcome if the make life
>easier, but calling them 'standard' is only possible if/when they are
>actually implemented by a large number of applications. Remember, I
>believe in 'de facto' standards.
>
>I think that m: is a wonderful and very useful extension to the standard,
>but AFAIK BarFly is the only program that supports it. In my view, macros
>shouldn't be part of the notation, and should be implemented using
>external tools like preprocessors. But that's just an opinion. I think
>I'll extend abcpp to add m: support.
That's a bit Linux-centric, Guido. Remember that in a GUI program,
the text editor, preprocessor and abc parser are all part of the
same program, and you can't just use an existing external preprocessor.
>That said, if all developers are willing to implement m: in their
>programs, that't fine. Otherwise, abcpp will do the job for them.
OK. There is already a perl script which expands macros; it was written
by somebody on this list, but unfortunately I've forgotten who, or
where it is.
If anybody is thinking of writing a preprocessor for this purpose, take
a look at <http://www.barfly.dial.pipex.com/bfextensions.html> for a
more detailed description. The code isn't difficult, and I would give
it away, but since it's in Pascal and uses some Mac toolbox calls I
don't think anyone here would find it useful.
In any case, if properly written, abc containing macros will still work
whether or not the macros are expanded, so they can be treated as an
optional extra.
Phil Taylor
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