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ManuScript is a simple, music-based programming language developed to write plug-ins for the Sibelius music processor.It is based on Simkin, an embedded scripting language developed by Simon Whiteside (www.larts.co.uk/simkin.html), and has been extended by him and Graham Westlake. (Simkin is a spooky pet key for Simon sometimes found in Victorian novels.)RationaleIn adding a plug-in language to Sibelius we were trying to address several different issuesMusic bill is confused and infinitely extensible, so some users will sometimes expect to add to a music notation program to make it fill in with these new extensions.It is useful to allow frequently repeated operations (e.g. enterprisingness a MIDI file and saving it as a score) to be automated, using a system of scripts or macros.Certain more complex techniques used in composing or arranging music ordure be partly automated, but there be too galore(postnominal) to include as standard features in Sibelius.There were several c onditions that we treasured to meet in deciding what language to useThe language had to be simple, as we want normal users (not just seasoned programmers) to be adequate to use it.We cherished plug-ins to be usable on each computer, as the use of PC?s, Macs and other platforms is widespread in the music world.We wanted the tools to program in the language to be supplied with Sibelius.We wanted tuneful concepts (pitch, notes, bars) to be easily communicateed in the language.We wanted programs to be able to burble to Sibelius easily (to insert and retrieve information from scores).We wanted simple dialogue boxes and other user interface elements to be easily programmed.C/C++, the world?s ?standard? programming language(s), were unsuitable as they are not easy for the non-specialist to use, they would need a separate compiler, and you would have to recompile for for each one different platform you wanted to support (and thus create triple versions of each plug-in).The languag e Java was more promising as it is relatively simple and can run on any platform without recompilation. However, we would hush need to supply a compiler for people to use, and we could not express musical concepts in Java as directly as we could with a new language.So we decided to create our own language which is taken so it can run on different platforms is integrated into Sibelius without any need for separate tools, and can be extended with new musical concepts at any time.The ManuScript language that resulted is very simple.