Greetings Brethren,

I'm about to plunge into some code to convert various musical note formats back and forth - "BB-" <->"Bb2" <->"bf3" etc. Looking around, I guess there are between 5 and 10 different formats that I'll eventually want to build in.

My problem is how to structure this. Possible options would appear to be...

• Provide (up to 100!) different methods for each conversion (ugh). More work for me, but with a consistent naming scheme (abc2kern(), kern2midi(), midi2abc() etc.), possible easier for the user - a simple list of format names would provide every possible method name.
• As above, but use AUTOLOAD or similar to 'generate' the method - split up the method name and call "convert($1,$2,$argument)"
• All passed as parameters to a single method - convert("BB-","kern","abc").
• As above, but 'autodetect' the original style - convert_to("BB-","abc") - slightly problematic, but possible.
• Named param style - convert(note=>"BB-",from=>'kern",to=>"abc")
• OO style - notetype->new("BB-","kern")->convert_to("abc).
• 'No param' OO style - notetype->new("BB-","kern")->as_abc()
• Use package variables to set defaults - $::INPUT="kern"; $::OUTPUT="abc"; convert("BB-");
• {Fill in your own favourite here :) }

...and I'm sure there are many others :). As this is intended for a CPAN module rather than supporting any specific piece of code, I have no 'in-house' style guidelines to follow, and I don't really know how potential users will want to use the module (or even if there *are* any potential users except for myself :) ), so want to make it as intuitive and consistent as possible. I guess that it'll most often be called as part of a loop in code that'll only be dealing with single 'from' and 'to' formats - hence the package default idea ( so that I'm not having to read/parse the format types for every call).

One wrinkle is that different formats may require / return additional parameters - ABC format, for instance, sets up a key and a default octave as part of its header, so they may need to be passed in ("F" in the key "D" would convert to "F#" etc.).

Atm, I'm favouring the named parameter style (easy to maintain and pass extra parameters ) but I'd be grateful for any input before I "get my coding pencil out" :)

Cheers,
Ben.

Title edit by tye

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