Re: preliminary GLISS discussions

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 5:37 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

>>> I had to let this sink in for a bit, since I had completely missed
>>> that a patch doing optional music arguments had went in. Had I noticed
>>> in time, I probably would have complained (and we might have ended up
>>> in a flamewar).
>>
>> It was a matter of "what's good for the goose, should be good for the
>> gander".  The existing hardwired LilyPond syntax used a variety of
>> optional arguments (partly skipped explicitly using \default, partly
>> left out like with \relative { c' }).  Bringing the preexisting syntax
>> within the scope of music functions meant making Scheme programmers
>> stop being second-class citizens who have to take what they are fed.

Right - under the assumption that the optional argument is a good idea
overall, the change codifies it explicitly and makes it available to
users.

If we are convinced that it was a mistake (which I now think), we
should have thought of ways to eradicate it rather than codify it.

> As one example for an analogous use of optional arguments, consider
>
> \tweak Accidental #'color #red cis4
>
> \tweak has always been a music function.  Being able to use a syntax
> fairly analogous to that of \override makes things simple and
> straightforward for the user.  You don't want to write \default in place
> of Accidental for every use without a grob qualification.


> And you don't want to have him remember different function names for
> each argument list variation.

Here is another premise that hasn't been agreed on explicitly. I would
nowadays hold that it is actually better to have different function
names, and have the user be explicit about what he is doing.

The discussion about syntax changes is not going to work unless we
know in what direction we want to go.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen