I'm with Chris on this one. Give Herb a break, if he tried to make the first pass all things to all musicians he'd never finish it (no reflection on your programming skills Herb, I quote what we used to call Von Neumann's Law in the early computer business - any system, no matter its percent completion, is always two years from fruition).
"What is in a name?". An octave is an octave, no matter the scale pattern or nomenclature. (Yes, I know that if we divided the scale into a different number of notes the term "octave" might be nonade or pentade, but then in our western twelve note scale it really should be called a duodecade, and a minor third a fourth). The matter of temperament is irrelevant as it is taken care of in the tuning of the frets (or in the fingering on unfretted instruments). As to other scales, again I go with Chris - for most of us it is enough to deal with our own scale without getting into oriental or other scales. And, neglecting temperament, our scale is the same as the medieval and renaissance in the number of intervals. I'm not sure when the division of the natural octave (or whatever you want to call it - the doubling of frequency) into 12 half tones came about, but it has been consistant in western music for a long time - just the details of the intervals have changed with changes in temperament. BTW Chris, what is the "common-practice theory system". My formal training stopped over fifty years ago (my last text book was Roger Sessions' Harmonic Practice (1951). But I still refer to it (and to Fux, which is a bit older). Best, Jon To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
