ABC with a UNIX flavor

Abstract

ABC is a simple, yet powerful, textual musical notation. This paper presents ABC::DT, a rule-based domain-specific language (Perl embedded), designed to simplify the creation of ABC processing tools. Inspired by the Unix philosophy, those tools intend to be simple and compositional in a Unix filters' way. From ABC::DT's rules we obtain an ABC processing tool whose main algorithm follows a traditional compiler architecture, thus consisting of three stages: 1) ABC parser (based on abcm2ps' parser), 2) ABC semantic transformation (associated with ABC attributes), 3) output generation (either a user defined or system provided ABC generator).