On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 11:45:02AM -0400, Jeff Szuhay wrote: > ALERT: Radical idea ahead! Disregard if your blood pressure is already > high. > > >I've been working on an Abc 2.0 proposal, which is a stripped-down > >version of 1.6. Amongst other things, I removed most of the headers > >(notably A-G, X and Z, to avoid confusion with notes and rests). > > Why are you guys wedded to the 1-character naming conventions? > > The ":" is a delimiter, that much people are used to. The could then be > expanded to something a _lot_ more readable like > c: --> composer: > a: --> area: > a: --> author > etc. and let single character labels be deprecated and with very > constrained usage. > > A parser should be able to know that a word at the beginning of a line > delimited with ":" is > a keyword.
Of course, It's already possible to do this, using the "%%" trick (convention). I've been forced to use this for %%Copyright, which is a thing that's important to keep track of, which ordinary ABC can't handle. But - I know the conventions, such as they are, for the "information" fields are not always as clearly defined, agreed, generally followed, as they might be, but they are, more often than not. You can usually, for instance, "grep" j.random.file.abc for "^O:" and get a list of the countries that the tunes in it come from. And, this kind of thing is useful. Lots of people do use these fields in the same sense. I'd like to see more usage of the same fields for the same meanings, not to throw the whole thing out. -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
