Alda: Music programming language

[jvanegmond]

http://daveyarwood.github.io/alda/2015/09/05/alda-a-manifesto-and-gentle-introduction/

[czardas]

Interesting. A lot of things are the same as mus++, such as using a single break to add a second instrument. I didn't notice catering for tuplets in the description, but maybe that's in there somewhere. Also musical performance instructions seem to be missing. I would say the language design is not too bad from what I have seen so far. It's still under development though. One thing I don't like is the use of percentages (note duration) to indicate staccato: that's so meaningless to a performer.

Although admittedly I am biased, I do prefer mine. The > symbol is an accent in mus++, and Helmholtz notation is already internationally recognized as an indicator of octave range. Accents are currently missing from mus++ because parsing accents still needs work, as does acceleration. I have also been considering adding chords which should be easy enough. The downside of using > and < to go up or down to the next octave is that you never know which octave you are actually in (since it is relative). I abandoned that idea for this particular reason.

Edited September 7, 2015 by czardas

[jvanegmond]

On the other hand, the REPL and this interactivate tutorial (if you follow along with the REPL) are completely badass. The fact it's a stand-alone language is also nice.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Manadar

[czardas]

I was thinking more in terms of syntax. I'm not sure what you mean by stand-alone: you have to install the interpreter. I can see it's made an impact.

I'm glad you posted the link.

Edited September 7, 2015 by czardas

[jvanegmond]

It's surprising how close your two implementations are. You should reach out to the author. I think he will like seeing your stuff.

[czardas]

It's surprising how close your two implementations are.

In some ways it's not so surprising because we both base our syntax on an existing universal model - music notation.

You should reach out to the author. I think he will like seeing your stuff.

Yeah, I will do shortly. If you want to mention it straight away, by all means be my guest.

Edited September 8, 2015 by czardas