Richard Robinson writes: | But, one little thought occurred to me, re the much-discussed and | little-agreed "!" staff-break. With no prejudice as to whether this ought | to exist, etc etc (except that, the more I think about it, the more I'd | like it, so, if it helps ...) it needn't conflict with the !decoration! | notation at all. Generalising from all the given examples of this, they | don't any of them contain any whitespace. Even if they did, maybe it | would be acceptable to say that such ornament-names may not begin with | whitespace, ie that there should be no whitespace between the opening | "!" and the first symbol of the ornament-name ? | And I can't think of any way in which whitespace following a "!" | staff-break could have any implications for the music (?? go on, | someone ...), so I think these 2 constructions could be mixed, on the | same line of text, without any ambiguity, by including spaces after | staff-breaks if necessary. It would be a slight restriction on | flexibility of abc layout, but that's the worst (only) catch I can | think of, and it would get round the conflict.
That would be a good idea, if we could get abc2win modified to follow it. The examples tossed out recently include several with a ! in the middle without any adjacent white space. I especially liked the one that had ... :|!: .... I also wonder if !da Capo! is an approved annotation. If not, it should be (along with !d.C.!). Of course, it doesn't start with a space. But I can easily see abc2win generating at least the "!da Ca" portion. People writing parsers will look at this and groan. Far too much ad-hoc lookahead for a dumb parser. Of course, traditional music notation is about as ad-hoc a language as you'll find. (Except for Intercal. Maybe. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
