Re: Why don't we get rid of \chordmode?

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 12:45:10AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> c4;7 does not really look anything like a chord.  Neither does c4:7, to
> be honest.  So at best slightly worse.

Trying to channel Han-Wen here, I think the discussion is going in
the wrong direction.  It started off with a few negatives of
chordmode:
  - can't combine voices
  - can't write chords and bass notes together
  - can't put non-chorded material in between
  - no relative mode

I'm not going to pretend to understand why this is so (I've never
used chords), but are we certain that it's impossible to solve
these in other ways?  I mean, isn't the "combining voices" a
limitation of the scheme/c++ implementation of chordmode, not a
fundamental property of the input syntax?

Non-chorded material would probably require an additional command
like \normalMusic { ... }, but again, I don't see why we need to
eliminate chordmode to solve these problems.

I'm also not enthralled by the various perlifications being
proposed.  The more punctuation we use, the less readable the
format gets.  \chordmode{ }  is easy for somebody to understand...
they might not know what the "mode" means, but if I see
\chordmode { c1 g c }   I'm pretty certain I'll see a C-major,
G-major, and C-major chord in the output.  If we do something
like |C| |G| |C| or C:: or C; or C$   ... well, those don't look
like anything in particular.


> Certainly would look like a
> (hopefully) downward-compatible candidate for bringing the feature into
> circulation before GLISS.

I think that, whatever happens about chordmode or punctuation
marks, this change should wait for 3.0.  In other words, after
GLISS.

(on the plus side, we're down to 11 critical bugs, so 2.14 and
gliss are getting nearer!)

> In contrast, ; appears like it could dodge the issue until GLISS.

I don't think it's worth introducing a temporary change to a
different punctuation symbol if there's a good chance it would
change in 12-18 months anyway.

Sorry,
- Graham