Re: scheme - notes as variables

[Andrew Wilson]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 10:21:12PM +0100, John Mandereau wrote:
> Rob Canning wrote:
>> i was trying to do it using scheme just because i thought learning to 
>> do this kind of thing in scheme would help me with other aspects of  
>> lilypond in general - perl looks neat though "the swiss army chainsaw 
>> of languages" i heard it refered to as :)-
>
> Using simple regexp substitution with Perl, Python or whichever scripting 
> language you like is quite fragile, because regular expressions alone are 
> not enough to parse LilyPond input format.

Manipulating strings with regular expressions is fragile.  The perl code
in the message that you're replying to doesn't use regular expressions.
Nor does it attempt to parse the LilyPond input format.

>> maybe scheme is the wrong tool for the job?
>
> Currently Scheme is the only way to do it cleanly.

No it isn't. I invite you to read the perl code I provided that does
exactly what was asked for in a robust, easily extendible manner.

>                                                     Best would be  
> implementing lambda calculus in ly language itself; I hope it's possible  
> with writing a few music functions in Scheme.  People at the GRAME in 
> Lyon have already thought about lambda calculus usage in music notation, 
> their articles is a good starting point for implementing these ideas in 
> LilyPond.  I don't have time to do this myself before March, though.

You appear to be attempting to solve a much larger question than the one
Rob asked.

andrew