Re: Accidentals: Unwanted naturals

[David Bobroff]

Graham Percival wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 04:13:56PM -0400, David Raleigh Arnold wrote:
> > But in this instance, the majority of coders line up in opposition.
> > You have shouted down the users, but convinced none.  Why?  Because
> > you are wrong.
>
> We don't care.
> We don't have to.
> We're the telephone company.
>
> Cheers,
> - Graham "if you don't recognize it, look it up.  It's funny!" Percival

I've seen this discussion come up before.  The coders are not wrong (and 
no, I'm not a coder).  This is the way LilyPond works.  LilyPond is 
designed to take the musical content and render it according to 
established engraving practice.  Musical content includes pitches.  If 
you enter a 'b' in the key of b-flat LilyPond will produce a 'b' as 
LilyPond has no way of knowing what pitch you actually want.  That's the 
pitch you entered.

Likewise if you use TeX, or a high-dollar word processor, and you type 
"there" the program isn't going to know if you should have typed "their" 
or "they're".  It will print it very nicely on the page for you but 
that's all.  YOU supply the information.  The program provides the 
printed output.  It is the user's job to know what information to 
supply.  This includes the actual pitch names.

You can either choose to learn that rule or you can write an extension 
to make LilyPond do it another way.  I rather suspect that the cerebral 
overhead required for the latter is rather higher than simply 
remembering that you must enter complete information for all pitches.

-David