The website says For this reason, the use of a language designed specifically for IF, such as TADS, Hugo, Inform, or ADRIFT, is recommended. Who in the world uses that ??
Well, about every serious interactive fiction author
(especially Inform and TADS).
The language websites for Hugo, Inform etc explain that they have been designed specifically for text based adventure games.... Talk about specialization !!!!
What's wrong with specialization? There are so
many things that are the same in every int-fic game, that reprogramming it everytime would be a
waste of effort (parser, feedback from user).
Any way I have registered and am going to do plain old C ( okay, okay C++)
You are not serious, are you? C/C++ is about
the least suitable language for any kind of string
manipulation. You maybe could write something in
Ruby, scheme, or Perl... But even commercial
(graphical) adventure games start by writing an
engine for their product. If you know C/C++, it
will be not so much effort to learn any of this languages (much less than starting from scratch).
I have looked at all these (including Brahms),
and the problem with them is that they don't
even support a small subset of lilypond.
If you really need to do some serious typesetting,
you are forced to use the textformat. And this is
what will still scare most musicians away.
For a interactive musicapp to work good, it will
need to have a fair amount of typesetting knowledge,
and the best way is to have everything integrated.
I really think lilypond has some advantages (such as mixing lilypond with LaTeX, beautiful scores),
but to be a good replacement for finale and the others, it will need to have an interactive interface.
It seems to me that the developers are not really
interested in making it confortable for users (they have that right), but that means a that the
program is only usefull for musicians which are also
hackers (not many of them), and this is an onfortunate waste of effort.
Someone who's studied theory much isn't going to look at.ly source and freak -- they've already spent years learning how to describe music in an abstract form.
I study music and musictheory myself and know many musicians, and I can asure you, most of them will
freak out when they look at it.
Musicians are just not computer hackers,
and really don't want to know much about computers.
If you tell them, "here is a nice computerprogram,
but you will have to learn this language first",
they will probably look at you if you are insane
or something.
Lilypond format is more close to a programming
language, than to music structure. Musicians
know how to read scores, but music in textual
format is very awkward.
I am currently using lilypond
myself to typeset my Fugue, and my feelings are
mixed. The output is very nice, much better than
what comes standard out of finale. But textual
representations are just not suitable for music.
It is very dangerous to compare Lilypond to LaTeX,
because LaTeX is text, and you can see directly what you wrote. When you type '\chapter{first chapter}'
you know immediately what it means. While typing
lilypond goes quite fast, rereading it is almost
impossible. Finding problems is really a pain.
It takes more time to correct your mistakes than
it did typing in your text.
Of course Lilypond is very nice as a backend. There some frontends, but they are not at all suitable at a professional level (Brahms, noteedit, Rosegarden). And they seem to put
more accent on midi export and such, than on
typesetting.
I am currently thinking
myself to write a frontend for the Palm. The big
problem is that it is not trivial to write a program that does proper musicrepresentation,
even for an interactive program. It would be
more usefull if all this knowledge would be integrated in an interactive program,
(but with better quality than finale).
Let 's hope that there will be more effort in
the future in this direction.
Why does this get a 3 insightfull? This
is just plainly wrong! The moderators are
clearly not doing their job, or they don't
know anything about the GPL.
GPL quote:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
In other words, if you compile a GPL:ed program on a proprietary operating system, all the operating systems base libraries must be GPLed or you may not distribute it. So you can't distribute the GPLed MySQL with Solaris or Windows without GPLing the entire system. That is why we also have the LGPL.
Your interpretation is incorrect. Operating systems base libraries form an exception to the GPL.
To quote the GPL:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
This means you can safely distribute GPL programs
for propietary systems such as Windows or Solaris
Slashdot Mirror
True. Infocom's original inform language was one of the first (the first?) to create a machine independent byte-code. Java avant-la-lettre!
Well, about every serious interactive fiction author (especially Inform and TADS).
The language websites for Hugo, Inform etc explain that they have been designed specifically for text based adventure games.... Talk about specialization !!!!
What's wrong with specialization? There are so many things that are the same in every int-fic game, that reprogramming it everytime would be a waste of effort (parser, feedback from user).
Any way I have registered and am going to do plain old C ( okay, okay C++)
You are not serious, are you? C/C++ is about the least suitable language for any kind of string manipulation. You maybe could write something in Ruby, scheme, or Perl... But even commercial (graphical) adventure games start by writing an engine for their product. If you know C/C++, it will be not so much effort to learn any of this languages (much less than starting from scratch).
For a interactive musicapp to work good, it will need to have a fair amount of typesetting knowledge, and the best way is to have everything integrated. I really think lilypond has some advantages (such as mixing lilypond with LaTeX, beautiful scores), but to be a good replacement for finale and the others, it will need to have an interactive interface. It seems to me that the developers are not really interested in making it confortable for users (they have that right), but that means a that the program is only usefull for musicians which are also hackers (not many of them), and this is an onfortunate waste of effort.
I study music and musictheory myself and know many musicians, and I can asure you, most of them will freak out when they look at it. Musicians are just not computer hackers, and really don't want to know much about computers. If you tell them, "here is a nice computerprogram, but you will have to learn this language first", they will probably look at you if you are insane or something.
Lilypond format is more close to a programming language, than to music structure. Musicians know how to read scores, but music in textual format is very awkward.
I am currently using lilypond myself to typeset my Fugue, and my feelings are mixed. The output is very nice, much better than what comes standard out of finale. But textual representations are just not suitable for music. It is very dangerous to compare Lilypond to LaTeX, because LaTeX is text, and you can see directly what you wrote. When you type '\chapter{first chapter}' you know immediately what it means. While typing lilypond goes quite fast, rereading it is almost impossible. Finding problems is really a pain. It takes more time to correct your mistakes than it did typing in your text.
Of course Lilypond is very nice as a backend. There some frontends, but they are not at all suitable at a professional level (Brahms, noteedit, Rosegarden). And they seem to put more accent on midi export and such, than on typesetting. I am currently thinking myself to write a frontend for the Palm. The big problem is that it is not trivial to write a program that does proper musicrepresentation, even for an interactive program. It would be more usefull if all this knowledge would be integrated in an interactive program, (but with better quality than finale). Let 's hope that there will be more effort in the future in this direction.
GPL quote:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
Your interpretation is incorrect. Operating systems base libraries form an exception to the GPL.
To quote the GPL:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
This means you can safely distribute GPL programs for propietary systems such as Windows or Solaris