On 7 Jun 2003 at 8:28, Craig Parmerlee wrote: > Every release of Finale I have used has supported slurs, 8va and > practically all the SmartShapes that are used today. Granted the > SmartShapes changed the way these are manipulated (and presumably > stored). But in an object-oriented environment a successful strategy would > store the objects BOTH ways and therefore allow the older program to find > the version of the shapes it can recognize.
I don't think you really understand object-oriented programming. In an OO storage structure providing backward compatibility, there'd be a base class object that had the properties/methods common to all versions. The then version-specific instance of that object would be subclassed to add the newer properties/methods. This might very well be something that cascades through various levels of subclassing. But the real problem is what to do with elements that use conflicting storage methods. Take, for instance, engraver slurs. There would be a base slur class object, and it would be sub-classed by all the versions that used that class object's structure. Then at a certain point when engraver slurs were introduced, it might be that the new structure could *not* be created by subclassing the old base class object, so you'd need to base it on a new class object. Then the issue of conversion would be a matter of converting the new class object into the old, replicating the same look. That would require some pretty fancy programming. Leaving aside areas that were just wholesale added in (such as graphics), there are dozens of such areas like that, such as text handling. The devil would be in the details of writing the conversion code to convert one storage structure to the equivalent old structure. And my bet is that it wouldn't be successful enough to be satisfactory for the vast majority of users. If you're not satisfied with MIDI import, I doubt you'd be satisfied with these conversions. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
