Bob Tennent wrote: > Last November, Dirk Laurie suggested that we should be porting the M- > Tx/PMX/musixtex/musixflx toolchain to LuaTeX. I won't review his arguments > here, but I'm pleased to report that Nikhil Helferty, a student here, has > successfully converted musixflx.c (version 0.83.3) to musixflx.lua > (version 0.83.3.luaN, currently N=1).
This is indeed excellent news! > It should be functionally identical to musixflx.c (up to round-off error). Is this just a throw-away line or are there actual systemic differences in the precision of the floating point variables used? Floating point calculations are a CPU function - it would be beneficial if the results strived to be *identical* on the same architecture (a guarantee which TeX provides). I'm not terribly familiar with Lua, but I would anticipate that C will be more flexible here - both scripts should use the same floating point representation for calculations which will eliminate all sources of non-algorithmic rounding error (if necessary, the C script could be changed). Most of the work I do involves a lot of regression tests against reference copies of known output so I'm always particularly sensitive to statements about rounding "errors" ;o) > It's been tested on hundreds of examples but there may be bugs lurking in > rarely-exercised parts of the code so please test it on your most complex > and unusual scores, and report problems to me (attach problematic .mx1 > files). > > Usage: > > musixflx.lua is a lua script and so is used essentially as follows: > > lua musixflx.lua basename > > This requires a lua interpreter; for example, from here: Are there options available for producing native executables from Lua scripts on at least the major three platforms? If there are, then it would seem an excellent time to look towards dumping the C script entirely - the ability to produce a native executable would mean that anyone using MusiXTeX on a system which doesn't have LuaTeX instead would not have to install a Lua interpreter so it wouldn't make the installation of LuaTeX any harder. David ------------------------------- TeX-music@tug.org mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
