Re: MusicXML

[Paul Morris]

On Apr 24, 2013, at 12:52 AM, address@hidden wrote:

> Python is a great tool for XML creation.  There is also 
> http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/xml.html.  The advantage of doing it in Scheme is 
> that you are building it directly into LilyPond.  

Doing it in scheme does seem to offer some nice advantages.  I looked into it 
and found that there's SXML, a scheme version of XML:

SXML:

    '(doc (title "Hello world"))

XML:

    <doc>
      <title>Hello world</title>
    </doc>


And there is existing scheme code that converts SXML to an XML file.[1]  So if 
all went well (ha ha) it would "just" be a matter of rearranging the scheme 
data from the music stream into SXML format, following the MusicXML 
specification.  Though I'm sure that's harder than it sounds.

Having all the moving parts in scheme would be nice and having an internal 
scheme version of the XML file might make it easier to (eventually, maybe) add 
in additional data that is not part of the music stream.  

Is the music stream what you see when you use \displayMusic as described here?
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/extending/displaying-music-expressions


[1] http://modis.ispras.ru/Lizorkin/sxml-tutorial.html#hevea:serializ

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SXML

[3] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-matters31.html
Quoting: "XML is semantically almost identical to the nested list-oriented data 
structures native to Lisp-like languages. Anything you can represent in XML can 
be straightforwardly represented as SXML -- Scheme lists nesting the same data 
as the original XML. Moreover, Scheme comes with a rich library of list and 
tree manipulation functions, and a history of contemplating manipulation of 
those very structures. A natural fit, perhaps."

Cheers,
-Paul