Bc2000 (for the BCF2000 & BCR2000)

--- In bc2000@yahoogroups.com, Steve Wahl <steve@...> wrote:
> It still seems unusual to me that full ascii text is sent as sys-ex,
> rather than some of the usual binary gibberish, I mean, some encoded
> form of the data.  Having experience with other sysex protocols, I
> half expected that you write this BCL and run it through a translating
> program that produces the actual sys-ex bytes that you send.  
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I'm *glad* to hear that's not the case!
> 
> Sending actual ascii text instead of a binary blob actually makes a
> lot of sense.  As firmware is upgraded, it's not as easy to add
> settings for new features into the sys-ex and still remain compatible
> with old sys-ex files if you use a binary blob.

In theory you are right that BCL's text format is more 
upgrade-compatible. However, having spent months trying to get to
grips with BCL and its bugs and quirks, I feel permitted to say that I
don't like BCL at all, and would have preferred an old-fashioned,
compact sysex format:

For one thing, Behringer themselves have never released any syntactic 
details of BCL. This means that it has no advantage to end users (over 
binary sysex data): all you notice is how excruciatingly long it takes 
to upload a preset to the BCF/BCR: if Behringer had used a purely
binary sysex format, an upload would have taken perhaps a tenth of the
time it takes now.

Secondly, BCL is probably the sloppiest computer language I have ever 
seen. Just read BC MIDI Implementation.pdf and you'll see what I mean.

By the way: I fished the very acronym "BCL" from out of the BC-EDIT 
binaries - and I'm still not sure that it really means "B-Control 
Language". Someone recently suggested "Behringer Coding Language" - 
personally I'm leaning more and more towards "Badly Constructed Lingo"...

Mark.