Re: Microrhythm

[David Kastrup]

Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> writes:

> On 5/21/18, 10:02 PM, "lilypond-devel on behalf of metachromatic" 
> <address@hidden on behalf of address@hidden> wrote:
>     
>        BTW, it's trivial in Lilypond to get the program to print out
>     entirely irrational time signatures or note values with square root
>     (or third root, or whatever) appended. Turn the time signature off and
>     then enter code to get Lilypond to print the radical sign with
>     appropriate numbers inside, etc, while approximating irrational time
>     signature and/or note values with a large integer ratio. The same
>     problem applies, however -- Lilypond does OK if you use one or two
>     irrational tuplet values, like (say) 3 in the time of the square root
>     of 11, or the square root of 17 in the time of the cube root of 71,
>     but if you include more than a handful of different such irrational
>     values you quickly run out of integers with which to represent such
>     numbers internally within Lilypond, and the program barfs and says
>     "moment not increasing. Aborting interpretation" and halts.  Since
>     this is a major bug, naturally it has never been addressed, and
>     obviously it never will be addressed by any of the Lilypond
>     programmers. Standard, usual, typical, and quotidian.

A tirade from someone who appears quite full of himself and nobody else.
LilyPond programmers have addressed a whole lot of non-standard uses
over the time.  LilyPond's development is mostly driven by interested or
self-invested people.  Gratuitous insults are not really the most
promising manner to make others vested in your case.  They are not the
most promising approach to get them to work on providing you with the
information for doing the work yourself, either.  If you as a principal
user of such functionality cannot be bothered working on it, why would
you imagine that such verbiage is prone to get _others_ to do the work
for you?

> And for my personal interests in LilyPond, fixing the "major bug" of
> failing to work with large irrational tuplet values and time
> signatures is completely uninteresting.

Midi cannot represent irrational tuplet values either way.  We are
rather talking about large _rational_ tuplet values used as
approximations.  LilyPond's "rational" type should indeed get replaced
by Guile's rational types which would seriously shift the threshold
where things start breaking apart at the cost of efficiency.

That's quite a lot of tedious work (I have some started patches for
different approaches to that) but of course if its seminal for someone's
_own_ work, the motivation for finishing that might be larger.

-- 
David Kastrup