Re: Using .ily for included lilypond files

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 06:08:44PM +0200, Valentin Villenave wrote:
> No. We /have/ to think about newcomers. Children,
> non-English-speakers, your grandmother, etc.

> Besides, I for one, would not have half as much of a pleasant
> experience writing music if I couldn't write if using my own language.
> (And singing the note names while typesetting :-)

Oh yes.  I can't even count the number of times I've sung "A sharp
eight dot dash dash dash dot open left parenthesis".  It makes
writing lilypond very easy!

> I have handled several LilyPond-discovery-sessions with various kinds
> of people, and I can tell you the \include thing is discouraging. A
> long command in English only, such as \setNotesLanguage, is only a bit
> better.

Umm... how is this worse than everything else in lilypond?
\relative, \clef, \key, \time (vs. \times!),
\numericTimeSignature...

> If I had anything to do with it, I'd go for a very short
> command such as
> 
> \lang "italiano"
> 
> or even preset shortcuts such as
> 
> \italiano

I'm not certain how these suggestions would define the scope of
the command.


I liked somebody else's suggestion (sorry, I completely lose track
of names when it gets above 30 degrees)  that would allow
different languages to be mixed freely.  Now, if you can think of
a way to make these commands do the same thing, and can provide a
patch to do it, I'm not opposed to accepting it.

> > Quite apart from the programming parser-changing stuff, it just
> > gets in the way when people submit bug reports or code snippets on
> > -user and forget to include their "english.ly".  :|
> 
> This doesn't happen everyday... And perhaps they'd be less likely to
> forget a simpler, shorter command.
> 
> Regarding the .ily thing: what about renaming only the -init files for
> now? This would hardly break a thing.

That defeats the whole point!  The whole idea is to reinforce the
notion of .ly being used for the \score, and .ily being used for
non-compilable files (if you know what I mean).  If we suggest
that users use .ily for such files, but don't use the in the main
lilypond source, they'll get confused.  It's all about user
interface design.

That said, this could be a way to phase it in gradually.  2.13.2
retains the current system; 2.13.3 renames -init.ly to -init.ily;
2.13.4 changes the "optional" .ly files to .ily.

Cheers,
- Graham