Re: [GLISS] - alternative viewpoint

[address@hidden]

On 14 sept. 2012, at 19:56, Phil Holmes <address@hidden> wrote:

> OK - so there's been a lot of discussion of pre- and post-fix, and a load of 
> other stuff I don't understand.So I had a think about what it is about 
> lilypond syntax that p**s me off.  And I concluded that it's nothing to do 
> with whether we write c4 /p for a quiet crochet c, as opposed to /p 4c.  I 
> really don't care.  When I was a tyro, I just read that and accepted it. What 
> does get me more concerned is how hard it is to find some of the correct ways 
> of tweaking output.  Using voice.SomeValue (or is it Voice.someValue) when it 
> should be staff.Somevalue (or was it Staff.someValue) frequently results in 
> no change to the output.  And is it \override or \set?  And \revert or 
> \override back to something else.  And finding what comes after the \override 
> staff.Something - is it ##f. or #'4 or 4 or { 4} or what?
> 
> If you follow what is asked on -user, it's this stuff that causes confusion, 
> not pre- or post-fix.
> 
> Now - I have no idea if this is possible or not, but when I put some of these 
> complex overrides into my converter, the commands to the converter use a 
> C-like syntax.  For instance, I've written a feature that allows the 
> converter to scale durations:
> 
> scaleDurationsOn(n,m)
> 
> I personally think that providing more of these simple syntax features would 
> make it much easier for the average user: we do have a few shortcuts of this 
> type: for example:
> 
> autoBeamOff = \set autoBeaming = ##f
> melismaEnd = #(context-spec-music (make-property-unset 'melismaBusy) 'Bottom)
> 
> Why not focus on making the slightly complex part of Lilypond much simpler 
> (not the very complex, like customer scheme functions - if you can do that, 
> you don't need help)?  And getting rid of case-sensitivity in a lot of this? 
> And providing error messages when an override has no effect because it was at 
> the voice context and should have been at staff?
> 
> --
> Phil Holmes
> 
> 
> 
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> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel

I completely agree with Phil.  Reading the user list, it is comparatively rare 
that people seem to get hung up on pre-and-post stuff.  What'd really help is 
"did you mean to do thing X?" or "thing Y will have no effect - consider doing 
Z" or even a "?" token one can put before or after an object to have help 
messages printed to the logfile as well as detailed information about the 
command in question and what it applies to.

Chers,
MS