Re: Minor variations on a re-used section

[Simon Albrecht]

On 22.06.19 09:01, Evan Driscoll wrote:
> 1. Is there some abstraction that's worth doing that will simplify or 
> shorten my code? (I seem to remember seeing some suggestion for 
> example to put dynamics and other expressive marks separate from the 
> actual music, but I can't find where I saw that, don't know if it's 
> appropriate in my situation, and don't really know how to do it.)


Tags have been mentioned; what you are alluding to is using parallel 
music expressions within a voice, i.e.

\context Voice {
  << \theme { s1 s\f } >>
  R1
  << \theme { s2 s\p s1\ff } >>
}


(\context should be used to reference an existing context only, if there 
is no Voice yet, use \new)


> 2. How much effort is worthwhile to put in to avoid duplication like 
> this? (There are some drawbacks to using music variables as well, such 
> as the point-and-click output feature points you at the variable 
> instead of the variable's invocation. Which is of course perfectly 
> reasonable, but the fact that there *are* two locations of potential 
> interest is itself a drawback.)
>
> 3. Am I just worrying about this too much? I come from a coding 
> background where "don't repeat yourself" is a pretty strong mantra, 
> and maybe it just doesn't work as well in this circumstance.


It depends entirely of the kind of music and your preferences. The more 
repetitive, the more sense it makes to condense those repetitions, but 
if there are more than a few irregularities, the time consumed by 
setting up the framework can quickly exceed the time used for typing it 
out or copy&pasting. Apart from your personal preference and coding 
style it may depend on what you need the code for: will you collaborate 
with someone? is it likely that you’ll reuse the code or work with it in 
the future? If you revisit the piece in two years and it takes you ages 
to understand how the heck all those tags and music functions and 
repeats are pieced together, that’s a major drawback… been there ;-)

Doing more sophisticated work and more stupid work both have their 
advantages and drawbacks. If for example you need to adjust many slurs 
in the repeated passage, you’ll be glad to only do it in one place 
instead of having to paste that into the other instances. On the other 
hand, if you need to adjust to line breaks or make small layout changes 
in only one instance, it will save you headaches to have just duplicated 
the code…

There’s no easy answer.

HTH, Simon