allowing \f and \F (was: [GLISS] - alternative viewpoint)

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 07:56:52PM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
> > Distinguishing \f and \F while ignoring case is going to be a rather
> > difficult operation.  While I generally try to accommodate a lot of
> > "make that work" requests, there are limits to what one can achieve
> > when fighting not just the current code base, but rather plain
> > logic.
> 
> :-)

I agree that distinguishing \f and \F is difficult.  However, if
the programmers-as-developers were willing to discuss ideas and
look for solutions, there are other options.  What is the
fundamental desire here, and is there any way of accomplishing
this?

For example, what about my hated idea of splitting namespaces of
music fuctions and identifiers?  I'm not fond of perl, but
something like this is unambiguous:

  $F = \markup { "Horn in F" }
  {
    c$F
  }

We could even retain the current method of creating identifiers;
this doesn't need to break existing scores.  The remaining
question is whether to make $names case-sensitive or not -- or,
for that matter, whether to allow only ascii characters in $names
or whether to allow any utf-8 character.  Maybe non-native English
speakers would appreciate being able to name their music in their
native language.


I will undoubtedly now be subjected to a steam of abuse from
programmers about problems that I did not think of in the past 3
minutes.  As a pre-emptive attempt to mitigate that abuse, I will
state THAT I DO NOT EXPECT, NOR EVEN DESIRE, DAVID TO IMPLEMENT
THIS.  THIS IS AN IDEA, NOT A COMMAND FROM THE UBER-BOSS.

- Graham