Well, I don't know what a program should or should not do, but the
readability and convenience of this exact notation was considerable part
of the incentive of choosing to do it in this manner: a tied note does
not want a repeated attack when playing, and not needing to write the
pitch again meshes nicely with that.
I agree, especially for a manually generated file. For a programmatically generated file, I don’t think it’s a good idea to use this kind of shorthand: music being music and musicians being musicians, it’s very likely that you want to modify whatever you wrote with your software (the case here, to make your software transform notes into rests). For all modifications, an explicit notation will only help your own program: without shorthands (and in absolute mode), your program can simply transform what needs to be transformed, copy or move what needs to be moved without losing the integrity of the musical event and without having to re-interpret a notation that is less explicit, i.e. without having to re-make the full object because it needs to be full in a different context (like rests in this case, but the same applies to pitches and durations, which can be omitted in Lilypond as well).
On 22. Feb 2021, 23:29 +0100, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>, wrote:
Well, I don't know what a program should or should not do, but the
readability and convenience of this exact notation was considerable part
of the incentive of choosing to do it in this manner: a tied note does
not want a repeated attack when playing, and not needing to write the
pitch again meshes nicely with that.