> Perhaps this is a good time to bring up the idea of a central set of > parser "test cases" and "test case fragments". In the past a number of > list members have mentioned the desire to have a corporate body of test > cases that could be used during testing and development of abc parsers. > Perhaps this open source project could be a forum to officially start > collecting those test cases.
I've given several developers here copies of my CD-ROMs, as they're large, carefully transcribed collections, intended to be used far into the future, and where any idiosyncrasies are deliberate. The "dialect" of ABC I use is basically BarFly-with-the-bugs-fixed and without using some of the more arcane stuff. The idea is that if any incompatibilities should arise in futurw, it'll be clear enough what I meant that any musically knowledgeable user can fix the problem. The one important place where I've gone beyond anything BarFly has at present is in using part playing order for multivoice pieces with the same semantic model as in the 1.6 standard for monophonic ones. It's obvious what I mean but no software can interpret it yet; I have no intention of altering it until someone comes up with a syntax that expresses what I want, and meanwhile there are hundreds of CD-ROMs floating about with this construct done my way. There's a sample on my "Music of Dalkeith" website which has a bunch of ABC tunes with MIDI, QuickTime and GIF tadpole equivalents that I've generated and proofed myself, so the intended semantics is publicly available. I would suggest that test cases be documented the same way. > This brings up another design/requirements issue when constructing this > parser: to what degree should the parser be lenient with non-standard > abc usage? For handling a large corpus (and preferably the entire corpus) you don't just want to be lenient, you want to provide error handling that will help a client disambiguate almost anything the most misinformed newbie might have tried with the aid of the least standard software or none at all. The musical content might still be valuable and the originator might be dead. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
