I'd like to open a discussion of the possibility of command line flag
compatibility (or perhaps "tolerance" is a better word) among various
versions of Csound. I'm particularly thinking of compatibility between
Csound5 and CsoundAV - but I'd certainly be interested in others as well.

Gab has already set up AV so that it is tolerant of canonical's flags, and
his proprietary flags all begin with "-+" - so there is no
overlap/duplication with canonical. I think it would be great if canonical
(CS5) could be tolerant of AV's flags as well (it currently is not).

I personally like to include all command-line flags under CsOptions in my
.csd files. My files are designed for neophyte performers (i.e., with little
knowledge of Csound), and I think this method is a bit more bullet-proof.

I've come to the point where all my realtime performance compositions (12)
will be totally compatible between CS5 and CsoundAV - *except* for the
command-line flags. Making the sets of flags tolerant of one another would
create total compatibility, for my files at least, between AV and CS5.

I'll also add that Gab is committed to making AV as totally compatible with
CS5 as possible. He also hopes that the effort will be as hearty in the
opposite direction.

I may be (and certainly am) naive about the technical aspects of such
"command-line-flag tolerance"; I should think the programming would be
trivial. However, the downside of such compatibility may be less obvious.

Pros and cons?

Art Hunkins