John Chambers writes: >Going back to || or [| isn't a very good idea. It's common practice >to use double bars to mark the "major phrases" within a section, and >they are (almost) never used as repeat boundaries. The code should go >back to |: or the start of the tune. We oughta state this in the ABC >standard docs. This would both answer the question, and make life >easier for implementers. >
There's a backwards-compatibility problem here: the [| and |] constructs came relatively late in the life of abc---in abc 1.6, I think, since my copy of abc2mtex 1.5 chokes on both. The result is that there are a lot of tunes out there (well...in my collection, at least; while I don't know about anybody else's, it's a pretty safe bet that there are plenty) which use || instead of |]. Of course I could re-edit most of them by a global search-and-replace, (at the price of a few unpleasant surprises) but I don't want to, since I want to be able to print them with my favorite legacy app. James Allright writes: >I think it is reasonable to require |: at the start of a repeat section >and issue a warning if it has been missed out. By "require", I mean that >a player program might ignore the end repeat if there is no start repeat >and just play once through. > I can live with that. However, having the player program go back to the beginning of a tune whenever there's no begin-repeat would be a serious bug IMHO. (And it would be nice to be able to turn the warnings off. Come to think of it, that seems like a good general design feature: warnings tell the user that there's something there which is neither correct nor a disaster. They're very useful, but if the user--mea culpa--already knows that that his or her practice is frowned upon, and is pig-headed enough to insist on using it anyway, the warnings become annoying, and he or she'll be better-disposed toward the program if it's possible to turn off the source of annoyance.) Cheers, John Walsh To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html