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

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 9:04 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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?

Specifically, I think it is because the tempo logically is an
interpretation property, and may have been just a \set property in
some earlier version. I'm not sure though.


> 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.

I'd say this ship has sailed, but I've been saying so all along.

I'd strongly recommend implementing this and copying a few pages of
music before making any decisions.  The everything postfix decision
was made after I had to copy music, and realized how jarring it was to
have to remember what goes where when copying music; I fear that your
proposal will require remembering more details.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen