Re: spacer rest *

[Br. Samuel Springuel]

On 5/1/18 3:15 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> Let me quote the documentation on this:
>
> Isolated durations – durations without a pitch – that occur within a 
> music sequence will take their pitch from the preceding note or
> chord.
>
> \relative { \time 8/1 c'' \longa \breve 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 128 }
>
> [music image]
>
> Isolated pitches – pitches without a duration – that occur within a 
> music sequence will take their duration from the preceding note or 
> chord.  If there is no preceding duration, then default for the note
> is always ‘4’, a quarter note.
>
> Nowhere does this talk about spaces.

That is where I think the potential confusion lies.  How are the phrases 
"durations without a
pitch" and "pitches without a duration" to be interpreted?  My guess is
that when a novice looks at `c 4 4 4` they would assume that
the `c` is a pitch without a duration unless they've been told somewhere
that the intervening space doesn't count.  At some point the
documentation must talk about spaces: when they count and when they 
don't.  In particular the fact that `c 4` and `c4` are equivalent should 
be made apparent.

The best the current documentation has on this is in the Learning Manual
(http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/learning/working-on-input-files) 
where it says this about whitespace:

> Whitespace insensitive: it does not matter how many spaces (or tabs
> or new lines) you add. ‘{ c4 d e }’ means the same thing as ‘{ c4
> d e }’ and: { c4                       d e   } Of course, the
> previous example is hard to read. A good rule of thumb is to indent
> code blocks with two spaces:
>
> { 
>   c4 d e
> }
>
> However, whitespace is required to separate many
> syntactical elements from others. In other words, whitespace can
> always be added, but not always eliminated. Since missing whitespace
> can give rise to strange errors, it is advisable to always insert
> whitespace before and after every syntactic element, for example,
> before and after every curly brace.

You'll note that in examples given here, the one duration that appears 
is never "separated" from its pitch by a space.  As a result it does 
nothing to clear up the ambiguity (or rather prevent it because this is 
Learning Manual material which the user should be familiar with before 
trying to decipher the Notation Reference material that David quoted).

I think it might be worthwhile to a) provide an example in the Learning 
Manual that demonstrates the equivalency of  `c 4` and `c4`; b) at the 
point in the NR quoted above, provide an explanation of what constitutes 
an "pitch without a duration" and a "duration without a pitch" possibly 
with a link back to the LM section on whitespace.
--
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Br. Samuel, OSB
St. Anselm’s Abbey
Washington, DC
(R. Padraic Springuel)

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