[abcusers] Re: %%ABC 2.0 identifier

[Bryancreer]

Irwin Oppenheim wrote -

>On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> Must?  What are you going to do if they don't?
>
>Please read carefully what I wrote. Then you will
>understand, that:
>
>1/ Users are not required to manually add any of these
>new fields to their ABC files at all.
>
>2/ Programs that import ABC files should not assume
>that any of these files are present.
>
>3/ The only requirement that I made is that programs
>that _export_ ABC notation, should add three fields to
>their output, that make it possible to identify later
>on which program generated the output, according to
>which version of ABC. That's all.

I have looked through the email I was quoting from and can find nothing corresponding to points 1/ and 2/.  In 3/ you have modified "must" to "should"; an improvement.

If you read carefully what I wrote, you will understand that the point I was trying to get over was that the principle of a standard is to unify abc regardless of its origin.  I don't want to have to use a different set of parsing rules
depending on the origin of the file.  That is no improvement on the situation we have now.

>> It is up to the developer to make it clear what
>> subset of the standard they do implement then the
>> user can make their choice and pester for the things
>> they want.
>
>Nobody disagrees on that.

Then why are you saying what applications MUST do?

A a further point, you are defining %% commands as mandatory parts of the standard whereas their current usage is application dependant in such a way that they can be safely ignored by other applications.  They are thus, by definition, not part of the standard.

Bryan Creer