2010/11/17 David Allsopp wrote: > musixflx.c - roughly 35KB of C sources > pmxab.for - roughly 750KB > Gregorio - similarly, roughly 750KB of sources [...] written in C. > > In other words, we're talking about porting a vast amount of code for the > pre-processors.
Add to this prepmx written in Pascal, and you'll have to prepare for a maintenance nightmare. With luatex (and texlua) at least a single programming language comes available on all TeX-supporting platforms. I think that a port of the different tools to this (or any) unified environment is crucial for continued support. After all, who still knows Fortran nowadays? (Yes, Don is the master of course! But it is a dying skill.) Even knowledge of Pascal is declining. It would be very regrettable if the many hours and great deal of knowledge that have been put in these programs would be lost because it is locked up in a programming language that nobody knows any more. With a port to Lua (or Perl, Python, Ruby), I see as the main advantages from the language itself: easier string handling, dynamic array sizes, hash tables. As Veronica already pointed out: it has to be staged, gaining experience with every little step. Kind regards, Arjen Bax ------------------------------- [email protected] mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
