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

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> On 01/09/12 17:25, Graham Percival wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Have to say that I think that there will be greater confusion down to
> having 3 different ways to indicate a command, than there will be over
> what entity the command applies to.
>
> After all, the general form of
>
>      \command x
>
> is easy to understand -- \command applies to the entity x, or
> alternatively to any group of entities contained in brackets { }.  I
> don't think it's confusing in general that x could be a note or some
> other entity.  (Are there good examples where it _is_ confusing?)
>
> The tricky thing is when you have something like,
>
>       c'4 \p c' c' c'

Ok, and now for something completely different.  I think there has been
one proposal to bring \[ \] in line with the post-event nature of [ ]
and ( ), but the one thing I have been thinking about recently is
whether we should not actually be going the other way round.

Basically every construct that we would be tempted to use <> or s1*0 for
occasionally is one that is not really attached to a note, but rather to
a moment in time.  You can put it in parallel music without changing
results.  Most articulations with a shorthand can be attached to
individual notes in a chord: those are really intrinsically attached to
the note before, and it makes sense keeping that even if per-chord
articulations can be placed into parallel music.  But things like ( ) \(
\) [ ] \p \< \! \> all happen at a moment in time in a voice.  Why is a
tempo change a separate event, but a dynamic change isn't?

One argument might be that
c( c)
might look ugly, but less ugly than
(c )c
looks.  Of course, neither is symmetric.  But if our logic is strained
enough that people want to invent new constructs for preserving the
current _order_ of writing while differentiating the logic, maybe it
would make more sense to rethink the order.

Another argument against it would be that all of the above constructs
can benefit from a direction: ^[ is different from _[, and ^\p different
from _p.  Should the direction modifier be tied to the occurence of
post-events?  Valid question.

And one valid answer certainly would be "this ship has sailed".  But
that argument would hold equally for the invasive changes introducing
new syntactic differentiations.

-- 
David Kastrup