Re: Naming _another_ lacking puzzle piece

[James]

Trevor

On 13 October 2012 23:56, Trevor Daniels <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> 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.

I have a patch coming that is trying to at least document \single
\hide and \omit.

i also have started to use \single to take the opportunity to better
organize NR 5.3.

I will post what I have tomorrow late afternoon - as 'needs work' as I
have explained to David, that I have a bit of a grasp on these
subtleties but am not a programmer to know how to articulate these
important functions to non-programmers.

Examples, at least _good_ examples of @lilyponds are what helps.

James