Although many years ago I posted something on this topic, this post
is directly inspired by the discussion on the "r+0.g" error.
2017-02-25 12:51 GMT+02:00 Dirk Laurie <dirk.lau...@gmail.com>:
> 2017-02-25 8:56 GMT+02:00 Andre Van Ryckeghem <a...@telenet.be>:
>> 1 1 4 4 4 4 0 0
>> 1 1 16 .0
>>
>> t
>> ./
>> r8+0.f r.g g.f r+0.g
...
> - M-Tx should have no problem with the same input because the dot
> shortcut is not passed as-is to PMX, it is preprocessed to make two
> notes. However, it does have a problem, since the following PMX line is
> produced
>
> r8+0d r8d g84d f1 r8+0d
>
> That goes onto my TODO list.
I find myself utterly reluctant to do anything more about this one than to
start a section of the Manual called "Known bugs and workarounds".
The fact that PMX is coded in Fortran, and M-Tx in Pascal, are instances
of the Hammer Principle.
"It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything
as if it were a nail." — Abraham Maslow, 1966
PMX and M-Tx both make heavy use of string processing, lexing and
parsing, laboriously coded from scratch in languages offering only not
even token support (pun intended) for those tasks.
The dot shortcut is a distinctly nontrivial task. The M-Tx source code
has these comments to the procedure "extractDotShortcut".
{ Extracts the dot shortcut part of a note: comma shortcut is no problem
because a comma cannot be part of a number. }
I.e. the procedure needs some sophisticated awareness of what might
be legal note syntax just before the dot.
Nowadays TeX has Lua available in just about every installation. I no
longer have only a hammer. I have a whole chest filled with modern
power tools. It's not fun anymore just pounding things into shape.
I am willing to collaborate with anyone who is willing to rewrite M-Tx
in Lua. (I had a decent go at doing at alone about a year ago, and
found it not to be that easy, though.) I'll also collaborate with anyone
who is willing to take over the maintenance of the Pascal source.
But ... (verb.sap.)
-- Dirk
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