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

[Thomas Morley]

Let me drop in some remarks:

About me (you can skip this, if you want):

I'm a musician and music-teacher.
The first 35 years of my life I wouldn't have known how to switch on a
computer, but then I met my girl-friend. :) She used LilyPond and so I
discovered LilyPond for myself.
In the follwing years I used this great program. But I made the
experience that not all features, needed for my own scores, were
available.
So what to do?
Ask someone? Learn more?
I choosed the second and decided to learn scheme (currently still improving it).
Nowadays I'm able to write nearly all scheme-stuff I need, to answer
numerous questions on the user-list, reporting bugs and work-arounds
for them, etc.
I set up LilyDev and recently submitted my first patch, struggling
with the new world of developer-tools.
Perhaps some day I'll decide to learn C++

Participating the Waltrup-meeting was a great experience:

On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:37 PM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Think about the Waltrop trip -- I think
> that the most valuable parts were seeing each other, eating
> together, talking about cross-cultural issues, looking at scores,
> hearing about Janek and Rudolfo's typesetting work, our
> conversation in the garden, etc. [...]

+1

Reading this discussion so far, I sometimes feel not encouraged to
continue my way of  “learning more“.
Well, of course there is sometimes an antagonism between the interests
of users and developers. But I think the main points of a
music-typesetting program are:
(1)Deliver the most beautyful output as possible.
(2)Offer the most simple or at least consequent syntax as possible for
the user. In the end a musician will be the user, at least of the
printed score.

So I'm with Graham:

2012/9/3 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
> I do not think that musicians have nothing valuable
> to say.  I *especially* do not agree that documentation writers or
> teachers (in person) have nothing valuable to say.



That said, now some thoughts ontopic:
In most cases I'm quite fine with the current lily-syntax concerning
the pre/post-commands.
But there are cases I'd wish to be more consequent.

Example:
<c-1\2\rightHandFinger #2  g>
Sometimes backslash, sometimes dash!

Well,
<c-1\2-\rightHandFinger #2  g'>1
works, too.

But
<c-1-\2-\rightHandFinger #2  g'>1
not.

BTW, writing this post and looking for more examples I was surprised,
that sometimes adding a dash to a post-command works already:

c1-\startTextSpan f-\stopTextSpan

or

c-\glissando f

Summarize:
I'd vote for no extrem changes to the syntax, but to improve it
slightly in a more consequent manner.
Maybe it should be _possible_ to prepend a dash to every post-command.
Concerning music-functions, I think we should keep the current
behaviour. Music-functions mostly affect a larger section of  music,
appending them to any single event would be curious, except this  _is_
the wanted behaviour:
c-\parenthesize-|



-Harm