Re: DOC: Essay, 1.4 Building software

[David Kastrup]

Pierre Perol-Schneider <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi James,
>
> Sorry for the misunderstanding.
> Have you tried the snippet ? Have you seen the result ?
>
> It should be written :
>
> { <c' d' e'>4 }
>
> and not:
>
> <<c4 d4 e4>>
>
> Examples that follow should also be corrected.

Well, "corrected" is a hard word: they work as written and intended.
The main question I see here is how we should treat "Essay": as an
authored essay that we only keep compilable, or as something where we
actually want to keep the _content_ tracking best _current_ practices.

Is it an Urtext or do we not just keep it playable on current
instruments but rather let it make best use of the state of art?

Bach has written keyboard works where keeping in spirit with the score
has required contortions and approximations on contemporary instruments
that became considerably more playable over time.  As opposed to
historic LilyPond, historic players did not have the luxury of flatly
stating "syntax error" or "colliding notecolumns cannot be resolved", so
the historic essay had to make do with historic LilyPond rather than a
hypothetical idealization.

Should we ask the authors?  Or should we at least change that stuff
where one would say, as a current-day user of LilyPond, "ew, what?"?

-- 
David Kastrup