It is child's play to design an extensible file system that will accommodate words, music definition, the human genome, or anything else. It doesn't take 1000 programmers, just one good one who has been around the block a few times.
I have implemented such a structure on many projects and there is no end to scholarly papers on the subject in the computer science literature. When you know what you are doing it is no harder than designing a dead-end file structure. Conclusion: they don't know what they are doing in the area of file structures. At 08:01 AM 6/16/2002 -0700, Philip Aker wrote: >On Sunday, June 16, 2002, at 06:44 AM, Craig Parmerlee wrote: > >>Beyond all that, the argument that the file format must become >>incompatible to accommodate new features does not hold water. >>Programmers have been designing "extensible" file structures for about 40 >>years now -- structures that can accommodate future changes without >>rendering the earlier software unusable. > >A music description language is vastly more complicated than the text >stuff M$ has to deal with for M$ Wart documents. I'd say that while >humankind is getting closer to having a comprehensive music description >language, it's still a "work in progress". The problem being that it's >only reasonable to have an extensible format when certain base factors are >guaranteed never to change. By setting the base format in stone, Coda >might lock themselves into a description/technology combination that would >not travel very far into the future. For instance, it's still not very >easy to get a piano-roll look out of Finale. What would happen if it was >found that the base factors had to be altered to get this happening? They >could not change the base format and they could not offer piano-roll >scores. What is dumb then? > > > >Philip Aker >http://www.aker.ca > >_______________________________________________ >Finale mailing list >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
