Re: Lilypond Syntax Development and 3.0

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 07:25:21AM -0600, Carl Sorensen wrote:
> 
> On 7/27/09 4:22 AM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Lilypond Syntax Development   (tentative name)
> 
> Are you on mind-altering drugs? ;)

All the time, baby... sugar, caffene... I suppose even water
qualifies.  I mean, if I didn't drink water, my mind would
certainly be altered!

> > However, I think we now have a critical mass of interested users,
> > experience with the syntax, and developers.  I therefore propose
> > to have a Grand Project devoted to stabilizing the lilypond input
> > format.
> 
> There's probably another reason why it makes sense to do this at this time:
> the syntax has largely settled down.

Yes.  There's still a few inconsistencies such as \hideNotes, but
a determined push can clear up all those issues.

> > - tweaks will not be included.  Anything with \override, \set,
> >   \overrideProperty, \tweak, \revert, \unset, #(blah blah) ...
> >   including even those names themselves... is still fair game for
> >   NOT_SMART convert-ly updates.
> 
> One nice thing about this limitation is that it allows ongoing syntax
> development outside of the base syntax.  That is, if somebody wants to
> develop a new feature that is incompatible with the existing base syntax,
> they can do so in the form of a tweak (in the general sense, not the \tweak
> sense).  They can work out the bugs, get the functionality going, and have
> usable output, even if it can't be added to the base syntax yet.  So this
> preserves flexibility for development, while stabilizing syntax for standard
> usage.

Yes.  Also, the internal definition of \voiceOne or
\pointAndClickOn can still be altered at a whim, as long as we
update ly/property-init.ly.

> > Reinhold and Frederick: as you may have guessed, I'm proposing
> > that your patch waits until 3.0.  Anything requiring such manual
> > tweaks will make some people very unhappy, such as mutopia.
> 
> What if we added the new crescendo syntax as new syntax (e.g. with something
> like \newcresc), and kept the old syntax as well (so as not to break
> existing scores)?

Good idea.

Cheers,
- Graham