Phil Taylor writes: | Bryan Creer wrote: | >Unfortunately, to really to solve compatability problems you need a | >masochistic altruist who will go back and remove all the line-break !s | >from all the | >tune files created with abc2win over the last eight years or so which | >might annoy | >the people who chose to put them in. (I'm not volunteering.) | | Yeah, that's the rub. The thing to bear in mind is that we don't have to | stay compatible with abc2win, since the people who use that program don't | need the more advanced features which we are adding to the language. | On the other hand, we do have to maintain some compatibility with abc2win's | files, because they are priceless. What we must avoid is adding something | to the language which prevents new programs which conform to the newest | standard from being capable of dealing with abc2win's files.
That's a good summary. And it's not all that difficult to spot the abc2win ! usage. The !...! syntax for musical annotations is rather limited in what text is allowed. In particular, things like bar lines, brackets, parens, colons, etc don't seem to occur inside the !...! things. So when you find a !, you can just scan for the next !, and if you find any of these funny chars (or hit the end of the line), you know it was an abc2win ! char. Granted, this is kludgey and ad hoc, but it's not all that bad to implement. Maybe all we really need is a footnote in the standard that mentions this nonstandard use of ! and suggests this approach to dealing with it. Then, as long as we don't have annotations like !|! or !:[! we shouldn't have any serious problems. It does occur to me that someone will insist on writing music with cartoon swearing as annotations, and will want to write [EMAIL PROTECTED] They will just have to write their own software to deal with it. (Has anyone written any musical parodies in abc yet? Aside from the good old 4'33", that is.) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
