Re: Is there a short way of forcing a particular octave?

[David Wright]

On Fri 23 Dec 2016 at 11:02:59 (+0100), Gianmaria Lari wrote:
> On 23 December 2016 at 10:39, ptoye <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Not exactly, I think. In a chord \relative controls the first note as typed.

Quite right, my mistake, late nights... s/top/first/ [saves me a post]

> > [...] I really didn't mean to start a theological discussion about how one
> > should
> > type in music, but obviously some people feel much stronger about it than I
> > do. There are three ways of telling LilyPond what the pitch of a particular
> > note should be, and it/'s up to the user to try them out and decide which
> > one suits him and the particular piece best. For me, it's mostly \relative,
> > but the melodies usually don't move by much. If I were Webern, it would
> > be\absolute.
> >
> 
> There is a price to pay for having many different possibility to do
> something. A major complexity in writing Lilypond software (but we could
> say that this is not our problem :)) but also a major complexity in
> managing/reading the lilypond score source files. So I think it is always
> correct to think before adding something you can already do in another way.
> 
> I agree that in this case probably it makes sense having both.

I guess you're not a fan of Tim Toady. (And I quit Perl to program in Python.)

> Another thing, as Kieren mentioned, is what the documentation should
> promote: absolute or relative? I don't know.

If we strictly followed the Zen of Python, then only \absolute would
exist. And I think it quite sensible to make the final archive copy of
score use \absolute throughout. But LP is not just an archival tool,
and for everyday use, \relative is invaluable. (\fixed may be also,
but I don't use it myself because I haven't found a need; no other
reason.)

As for promotion, I'd have no disagreement with putting forward
\absolute first in the LM. However, once that's done, there's not much
more to say about it. OTOH \relative needs a great deal of explanation
because it has more ways of interacting with other constructions.

Compare it with school maths. You spend a lot more time learning
division than multiplication, extracting roots than squaring,
integrating than differentiating. That's not because the teacher
is trying to promote one over the other.

Cheers,
David.