Re: Naming _another_ lacking puzzle piece

[Trevor Daniels]

David Kastrup wrote Saturday, October 13, 2012 10:29 PM

I wrote

>>    Plus \once and now \temporary.  I agree this menagerie is going to
>>    be far more confusing to users than the occasional unexpected result
>>    after calling \crossStaff or \harmonicByFret - which no one has ever
>>    noticed.  Users get quite confused enough with just \override,
>>    \revert, \set, \unset and \tweak.
>> 
>>    We're going too far in this direction now.
>
> The last comment above states "we're going too far in this direction
> now", calls the commands a "confusing menagerie" and states that nobody
> noticed the kind of bugs one can fix with that anyway.  "quite confused
> enough" clearly strongly speaks against providing any more commands,
> preferring to stay with problems instead.

There is no doubt that explaining these concepts to musicians with no
experience of programming will be difficult, and at the moment it seems
no one is interested in writing documentation except me.  I felt I was
being forced into having to tackle this problem when I believed (and
still believe) that most users have been and would continue to be
quite unaware of the difficulties these extra commands are designed
to solve.

As a programmer myself I fully understand what you are doing; and
I'm quite happy with that.  So I shall have to find some way of 
documenting them so that non-programming users will not find learning 
LP even more difficult than they currently do. That was the basis of
my concern.  I'll sleep on it.

Trevor