Manuel Reiter writes; | | Maybe someone could state shortly why distinguishing between 'music' | and 'other' lines for continuation is a bad idea?
Basically, it because we've seen something that has been discovered by users of numerous programming languages where the same sort of "continued on next line of same type" scheme was attempted. It's quite difficult, if not impossible, to define "same type" so that programmers will all implement it the same. This approach can work if you permit only a single implementation. But abc is like other public standards, in that we are trying to encourage development of a lot of software by a lot of people. In such cases, you end up with the situation we have in abc now: Different programmers interpret "same type" differently, and taken singly, all their interpretations turn out to look very reasonable. The result is that your code (or tunes) don't work right with a lot of the software. In such cases, the history of programming languages shows that there is only one continuation scheme that will be implemented the same by all programmers, and that is the "continued on next line" rule. This is sufficiently clear that it can actually work. Interestingly, even a rule like "A backslash at the end of a line means ``continued on next line'' is still ambiguous and can lead to incompatible implementations. Other equally simple-sounding statements turn out to be just as ambiguous. If you don't immediately see the ambiguity, you might try thinking about it. There was a nice (and funny) illustration here a day or so back. I'll let others post the own favorite examples. This is, of course, a bit of a disappointment. "Continued on next line of the same type" sounds like a really neat idea. But our experience so far with abc, as with programming languages, is that this rule mostly just makes any use of continuations nonportable. If you want your music usable only with one or two software packages, you can do some nice things with such a rule. But if you want to be able to email your tunes to other people, or download others' music from the Net, such a rule leads to a lot of confusion. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
