Issue 2172 in lilypond: Get line and column numbers right.

[lilypond]

Status: Accepted
Owner: ----

New issue 2172 by address@hidden: Get line and column numbers right.
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2172

Line and column numbers are a total mess in LilyPond.

Guile has its port-line and port-column function 0-based, but since at  
least Guilev1 is not utf8-aware, the port-column is likely to be a byte  
offset.

LilyPond appears to prefer calculating lines 1-based, and columns 0-based.   
What LilyPond calls a column is a character.  This corresponds to the  
conventions used _inside_ of Emacs.  Unfortunately, the command line usage  
(see scm/editor.scm) and the GNU compatible error messages count starting  
from column 1.

Something which LilyPond happily ignores, making point-and-click  
functionality off-by-one.

I think it would make sense to make everything in LilyPond 0-based, and do  
the error messages (and calls to text editors, like with point-and-click)  
1-based.  That Emacs has a different column number concept in the editor as  
compared to command line and error messages is not LilyPond's beef since  
Emacs properly translates everything coming from those sources.