Re: [GLISS] differentiating pre/post/neutral commands

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2012 at 09:18:17PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Continuing to brainstorm on the problem of it not being obvious to
> > which note a particular \command refers to, what if we used:
> >
> > \postfix:      c2 d\p  is unchanged
> > /prefix: for music functions like   c2 /parenthesize d
> > .neutral: for commands which aren't attached to notes, such
> >   as .clef or .times.
> 
> It adds no new functionality and makes it harder to write and read
> things.  How should LilyPond behave if you get your slashes wrong?

Give an error?  The "new functionality" is "it becomes obvious
whether a command applies to the note before or the note after".
Since we wouldn't have any definition for /p, writing that would
produce an error.
(each prefix character would have its own namespace)

> Frankly, the current syntax discussions are leading nowhere.
> Brainstorming is fine, but pretty useless if there is no target or topic
> other than "let's make things different".

The target is "let's make it easier to learn/write/read .ly
files".

The meta-target is "after spending 5 years very publicly telling
people *not* to talk about changing the syntax because we would do
so 'in a year or two', I think I should encourage such
discussions.".  I mean, people trusted me when I said that there
would be a time for discussing syntax changes.  It was advertized
on our "help us" page for something like 3 years until Janek
commented it out in 884194 on 2012-02-14 because "noone knows when
GLISS will happen".  If I didn't fight to give people an
*opportunity* to have a meaningful *discussion* about syntax
changes before we stabilize things, I would be abusing that trust.


I'm quite open to trying to find a way to structure these
discussions so that people who are interested can participate, yet
people who aren't interested don't need to worry because they'll
get an opportunity to shoot down bad proposals before they're
accepted.  But we've barely *started* having a discussion about
changes, so I don't think that we can claim that they're going
nowhere.

At Waltrop, you only heard about one quarter of the ideas that
Janek had.  I've got about half of the number of ideas that he
had.  And that's just two people; who knows how many ideas our
users have.  Or what about people like Francisco -- IIRC he's been
teaching lilypond to composition students for the past 5 years.
How many people per class... maybe 30?  So he might have taught
150 students how to use lilypond?  I'm sure that he has some
thoughts about what his students found difficult to understand.

Of course many of our ideas will not be good.  That's fine!
That's how creative thinking works!  So let's create a place --
either on this list, or a different list -- where people can talk
about their ideas, point out flaws and make suggestions, look for
common themes, etc., and see if there's anything worth adopting.

- Graham