Re: What can Premusic do that others can't?

[Malte Meyn]

Am 21.03.2017 um 06:46 schrieb address@hidden:
> A composer who uses an irrational tuplet is a composer who is going out of 
> his way to exclude his music from comfortable notation. 
Oh, I think that these irrational tuplets are comfortable to write easy
to understand if you use traditional notation.

> I'm not too concerned about that corner case of corner cases and am frankly 
> honored you have to dig so deep to try and break my format.
If you’re interested I’ll do a quick search and find some more music by
not-cornercase-composers that breaks your format.

> But in any case, there's precisely nothing to stop you from approximating as 
> far as you want, with an explanatory comment appended if needed.
So here is the point where your format is readable neither for humans
nor for computers.

> Nor am I concerned if my plaintext file format is not as comfortable in 
> terminal editors as it is in the GUI text editors that everyone has and most 
> people use.
So the most powerful terminal editors like vim and emacs just aren’t
good enough for your genius format? Sad but probably their fault. Oh
wait: It’s not the choice of editor that makes these files uncomfortable
to handle with.

> I note that Ctrl-U (view source) renders it perfectly in Firefox. Is anyone 
> going to see a .premusic file online, save it, navigate to that location in 
> terminal, and be dismayed that the code is a little wide for their 
> unmaximized Emacs?
Yes, there are people that’ll do exactly this. (Ok, I prefer vim but
that’s not the point here.)

> If wraps become a necessity, then - fine! I'll make a wrap character. ;;
Ahaha, you thought you could do a complete score in just one line? I’ll
be happy to see your version of “Eine Alpensinfonie” by Richard Strauss.
I can imagine some text editors crashing on that. Maybe they won’t crash
if you insert line breaks but then you’ll need a very durable mouse wheel.

> --------- Original Message --------- Subject: Re: What can Premusic do that 
> others can't?
> From: "Werner LEMBERG" <address@hidden>
> Date: 3/21/17 12:19 am
> To: address@hidden
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
>  You might create a description of your syntax on, say, github, also
>  setting up a mailing list to which interested people can subscribe.

For this description to be perfectly well-defined/unambiguous you’ll
need a masochist who loves formal languages/grammars, at least if some
day a computer program should be able to read these scores. And you’ll
want that because no human can do so.