Re: OO and MIDI support

[Hans Aberg]

On 4 Nov 2007, at 17:43, Erik Sandberg wrote:

> > > Midi support in lilypond is quite limited, and this is not likely
> > > to change in the near future.
> >
> > Might it possible to handle this by OO (object orientation)? The idea
> > is that if objects can be defined (in pseudocode)
> >    turn := default: ...
> >            midi: ...
> >            short: ...
> >            quintuplet: ...
> >    ;
> > And one then is able to write code like
> >    d8^\turn[staff->short,midi->quintuplet]
> > if one in this position wants the turn to not be the defaults, but
> > then the staff to be written in the "short" form, and MIDI be written
> > as a quintuplets.
> >
> > The principle is quite general. So it might be useful for handing a
> > number of problems. The enhanced MIDI support would emerge as a
> > byproduct of this OO support.
>
> I don't understand all of this, but wouldn't it be possible to  
> achieve most of
> this functionality with tags? You could just use \keepWithTag  
> #'midi when
> creating midi, and then tag stuff with midi in the definition of  
> \turn.

I am not sure how this stuff you are mentioning is working, but  
essentially what OO does is creating an easy to use user interface.  
It is perfectly possible to do OO programming by hand in C, and C++  
gets some of its OO from such C by hand programming techniques, only  
developed as language features. And Guile has some OO package, I  
think. What I wrote above is a form of tagging, whose definition  
later can be changed by the "->" above, and in the compilation,  
selected by some context variables.

  Hans Åberg