Re: How much oop is too much oop?

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance


"Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1cda1f3ca5adf5189896b7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>...
> I realize that many (if not most) things are more difficult than
> they
> initially look, but after looking at your web page, I'm still
> scratching my head trying to figure out what part of it could fail

"Fail" in my terminology means any editing operation which would
result in something incompatible with music syntax. It would be
fairly easy to write a graphical program which just deposited
arbitrary music elements on a page, but that is not what MOZART
does.

> (other than finding that the system lacks a sound card)

No that is relatively inconsequential. Very simple - no sound card
and sound output goes nowhere, and MIDI input commands are disabled.

> so you'd have
> any use for what you're advocating. If you were trying to do an
> OCR-
> like thing, the irregularity of musical notation would clearly be
> a
> massive headache. Even starting from MIDI, and translating to real
> notation would clearly be quite difficult, especially in
> real-time.

It is. MOZART will convert MIDI to notation - at least as well as
most other programs. The problem is that it can be quite easy to
store something in MIDI which is not well described by notation at
all.

> OTOH, at least as I understand your software, it allows the user
> to
> enter music IN musical notation, and then displays (and optionally
> plays) the result. Maybe I'm really missing something crucial, but
> if
> you're doing a reasonable job of collecting the information to
> start
> with, it's hard for me to believe that displaying it quickly
> should
> be nearly this difficult or have much use for the kinds of things
> you've been advocating in this thread.

I thought that too when I started in about 1987. :-(

Displaying it *fairly* quickly is not a problem: the problems only
occur if you want to scroll between two closely spaced MIDI output
events - especially if you're running half a dozen other programs at
the same time.

The time-consuming operations are usually block-editing operations
where it has to check whether the result is consistent with music
syntax and getting a result which fits on the page. Moving a note
down a couple of octaves can start forcing staves apart to make
room. Design decisions are involved in knowing whether it just
forces the stave apart or says "no-can-do". Or only says
"no-can-do" if forcing the stave apart would cause the score no
longer to fit on the page. Some of this takes enough computation
that the user could end up looking at an hour glass cursor for most
of his life, if one ignored quick and easy ways of determining an
operation won't work, before actually trying to do it.

But don't get me wrong - trying to do it should always either
succeeed or fail gracefully, whether or not such tests have been
made. That is a given.

Dave
--
David Webber
Author MOZART the music processor for Windows -
http://www.mozart.co.uk
For discussion/support see
http://www.mozart.co.uk/mzusers/mailinglist.htm



.

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