[CM] CM3 compatibility

[Heinrich Taube]

hello ross,

> [...] Would you please
> elaborate a bit more about the direction of CM3? Here are some  
> specific
> questions as well:
>
> * Will I be able to use it and still program in LISP?

yes, it is written in scheme and Grace's Editor supports scheme syntax- 
highlighting, cursor motion by lisp s-expressions and command-D  
document lookup for scheme functions and variables.

> * FOMUS doesn't support Scheme, so will I still be able to use FOMUS  
> to
> create Lilypond scores if "the Common Music 3 branch is implemented in
> Chicken Scheme ..."?

i dont want to speak for david's work but i think he is pretty far  
along on a libfomus library. when that exists Grace will link to the  
lib and there will be a Fomus port for generating notations via fomus.  
I think David is even planning a Finale plugin for fomus, which means  
that you would be able to send data to the fomus port in Grace see it  
directly in a finale document!

the manuscpting work i announced a few days ago will mature over the  
fall and hopefull by spring it will make its way into Grace so at some  
point you will be able to use fomus to compute notation windows inside  
grace and save to wysiwyg pdfs. i have to say the layout and display  
by andrew burnson is blindingly fast, you can scroll through the whole  
set of chorales really quitckly -- its doing all that layout and  
display on the fly from pure ascii data--no notation info is stored in  
the chorales!

> * Are the CM3 sources separate from GraceCL, or are they all under the
> Grace/src subdir now? Are they already checked into SVN on  
> SourceForge?

not yet. the reason is (1) lack of time and (2) ive been waiting for a  
chance to port CM3 to one more scheme before making a decision on what  
it looks like. for now its a mishmash of Chicken SCheme and C.  But  
the good news is that it requrires very little from the host scheme  
(for example it doesnt use objects, doesnt deal with files) so couuld  
potentially be embedded in ant scheme with hash tables and an error  
system.

since it is possible to build non-gui juce apps, one idea ive been  
toying with is to release a /usr/local/bin/cm executable with  
everything in it that you could use in the terminal or inside an Emacs  
buffer.

for now its in the Grace sources on sourceforge.  Now that camil has a  
real good server ill be moving release pages etc there. i do pla a  
release this weekend before schools starts and will announce it as  
soon as it is ready.


> Thanks very much! -Ross

thansks for the intelligent questions!