Re: GOP2-3 - GLISS or not

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 27/07/12 11:11, Graham Percival wrote:
> Think of the stable notation as a subset, not the complete set.

Yes, fair enough -- it's very likely changes can be done additively and if not 
for the traditional syntax to be maintained as syntactic sugar.

> Hmm.  I'll have to think about this more.  My first thought is
> that sources of syntax problems is changing the syntax -- but
> rather being a "duh" moment, my point is that we've never changed
> the note-names and basic rhythms, so there's no data about how
> hard that would be.  Users would need to memorize a new set of
> note-namess (not hard, but annoying), programs which export
> lilypond would need to be updated, etc.

Well, since the question of the default note-name language was raised, that 
seems like a good basic way to test the difficulty of rewriting core syntax -- 
how difficult is it in practice to convert automatically from Dutch to English?

To me the users' need is the single most important reason to stabilize, together 
with 3rd-party tools that _read_ Lilypond -- for archival purposes, or 3rd-party 
tools that write to LP, the only thing that matters is that there is a reliable 
converter.  That's why I'd stress getting good data on what syntax changes cause 
convert-ly failures.

> I'll wrap your concern into the next version of this proposal and
> send it out later today or tomorrow.  That should give it extra
> visibility and somebody may have a good suggestion about it.

Cool!  Will look forward to it. :-)