Re: bug in german manual

[David Kastrup]

Malte Meyn <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 18.08.2015 um 09:01 schrieb Blöchl Bernhard:
>> Thanks for clarifying my confusion. As long as I used lilypond I always
>> used \tuplet and argue that I did not even know that \times was/is a
>> possible alternative.
>>
>> \time and \times are very close and so - I think - dangerous and
>> error-prone.
>
> I think the \times command should be removed completely from lilypond
> as soon as possible (2.19.xx/2.20.0) for the following reasons:
> (1) The two commands \times and \tuplet do the same with different
> syntax => confusion (especially for new users who copy old code which
> works in new versions without using convert-ly but doesn’t use the
> \tuplet function mentioned in the LM and NR).
> (2) \tuplet has a feature that \times doesn’t have (easily setting
> tupletSpannerDuration) but not the other way round, so using \times
> has no advantage => \times won’t be missed.
> (3) As Berndhard said ‘time’ and ‘times’ are indeed very similar words
> and ‘tuplet’ describes the functionality better.

That's putting-cart-before-horse territory.

(1) You complain that new users will be confused by copying old code
containing the barely documented \times command.  I don't consider it
likely that a "new user" will be less confused by "old code" that breaks
rather than old code that works.
(2) not transferring the tupletSpannerDuration setting was a conscious
decision since that overlaps with use cases rather explicitly covering
tuplets only.  \times is a close companion to \scaleDurations and
matches its syntax and argument meaning.  If it were desired,
transferring that optional argument to \times would be simple.  There is
nothing inherent in the definition of \times that would make it any
harder to add that argument there rather than to \tuplet.  I think that
one argument against doing so was that \times 2/3 c4 (or similar) used
to work while \tuplet 3/2 c4 would not, and so there was a compatibility
reason for not changing the basic argument list of \times.  However,
the underlying parser restriction for music expressions following
omitted optional arguments is no more.  So it's really just a matter of
"do we want this or not" whether \times accepts such an argument or not.
(3) we already implemented \tuplet and promoted it in the documentation.


-- 
David Kastrup