[talk] easy tuplets

[Graham Percival]

This is an informal chat idea, following David's latest suggestion
that such emails could go on -devel instead of requiring a
separate mailing list.  I fully expect this not to work.


Currently, durations are limited to powers of 2 (plus dots).
Making a triplet involves the wordy \times x/y { ... } or a *x/y
scaling factor.  We could avoid this (in common cases) by allowing
arbitrary integer durations.

  c4 e \times 2/3 { c4 e g }
into:
  c4 e c6 e g

The general rule is that the duration x is (whole note)/x.  So in
addition to the current
  1 2 4 8
we have
  3 => \times 2/3 { c2 }    (whole note divided by 3)
  6 => \times 2/3 { c4 }    (whole note divided by 6)
... etc.

These notes can be grouped together like we do for beaming, and
produce tuplet brackets according to tuplet-beaming rules.


I know that this idea has been floated at least twice in the past
ten years, but since this is only a [talk] idea, I'm not going to
bother looking up those discussions in the archives.  Remember
that you're not allowed to call me a lazy idiot for not looking up
those discussions because this isn't a formal proposal.  This
email thread should have "the casual atmosphere of a friendly
discussion at a pub or coffee house", and that nobody "will
complain about technically infeasible ideas, wasting developer’s
time, having to defend the parser, or anything like that".

- Graham