Buddha Buck wrote: >> The confusion in abc comes from the fact that there are a couple >>of types of macros (or "macro-like entities") floating around: First, >>Phil Taylor's Barfly macros seem to fit the Hacker's definition nicely. >>(Even his transposable macros fit, since the definition allows arguments, >>and these take a note as an argument.) >> >I'm not sure I like the syntax 100%, since it distinguishes a particular >letter as "the" argument. Is there a way to write a Phil Taylor macro >that uses an 'n' in the name of the macro?
Yes, this is one aspect of the syntax which bothers me too - you can't use the letter n in the target string of a static macro, or use it more than once in a transposing macro. Intuitively though, the use of consecutive alphabetical letters centred round a letter in the middle of the alphabet, and the association between "n" and "any" was irresistable. I haven't found this to be a problem in practice, but perhaps I ought to allow the use of an escape, e.g. \n for those cases where the n is to be taken literally, rather than to mean "any note". >There is a lot of possibilities for combinations thereof, especially if >it was written that during the macro-expansion phase, parsing would >start at the beginning of the expanded text. Phil mentioned a ~n3 >macro, that would perform a roll the way a piper would. But I can >easily see there being more than one alternative method of playing that >someone might want to notate as ~n3, in the same piece. I can't actually do that for ~ at the moment, because I haven't included the tilde in the list of symbols which can be reassigned (only H..Z). You could, however, do this for the trill. There are lots of ways of playing a trill, and you might want to use several of them in the same piece (while keeping the same printed notation for all). You can assign the trill to several different letters: U: T = trill U: U = trill U: V = trill now you can write three different macros to specify how the three different trills represented in the abc by T, U and V are to be played. Turn the macros off for display purposes and they will all be represented as a trill, turn them off for playing and each will play in the specified manner. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
