Re: [GLISS] - alternative viewpoint

[Francisco Vila]

2012/9/14 Phil Holmes <address@hidden>:
> OK - so there's been a lot of discussion of pre- and post-fix, and a load of
> other stuff I don't understand.So I had a think about what it is about
> lilypond syntax that p**s me off.  And I concluded that it's nothing to do
> with whether we write c4 /p for a quiet crochet c, as opposed to /p 4c.  I
> really don't care.  When I was a tyro, I just read that and accepted it.
> What does get me more concerned is how hard it is to find some of the
> correct ways of tweaking output.  Using voice.SomeValue (or is it
> Voice.someValue) when it should be staff.Somevalue (or was it
> Staff.someValue) frequently results in no change to the output.  And is it
> \override or \set?  And \revert or \override back to something else.  And
> finding what comes after the \override staff.Something - is it ##f. or #'4
> or 4 or { 4} or what?
>
> If you follow what is asked on -user, it's this stuff that causes confusion,
> not pre- or post-fix.

The nature of the language, and the wide variety of cases you can
encounter in real scores along with plain old everyday music, makes
two subsets of language rules to exist. One is common music notation,
with no overrides. I think a musician can learn this subset in full,
and enjoy most of lilypond, most of the time. Other is the tweaking
mechanism, which I find impossible to memorize. And what is worse, is
to see the raising eyebrows in faces of people who is suppossed to use
it daily, when you try to teach it to them.

Still, we have the advantage of that, being a human-readable text
format, one can simply copy+paste cool code from LSR that works with a
high probability of success.

I have been tempted of making an automated "absolutely complete whole
collection of all possible overrides -- illustrated" for this purpose.
No time is too late for this.

-- 
Francisco Vila. Badajoz (Spain)
www.paconet.org , www.csmbadajoz.com