Re: Define French as a separate input language (issue 288290043 by address@hidden)

[Valentin Villenave]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 11:07 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> I haven't seen a single reason why anyone would be wanting to use
> "francais" for specifying a notename language that calls d "ré".

I’m fairly certain that it wouldn’t be used, ever. (Voluntarily, that
is.) So this is a point I can grant you.
TBH, *I* for one will probably never even use "ré" in my own source
code (although I do use accented chars in markups, titles and
comments).

The real-world situation I’m thinking of, has to do with
French-speaking beginners I’ve been dealing with every year for the
past decade, and on *every* occasion, I’ve had people wondering why
their code wouldn’t compile and struggling to remember that "ré" was
to be written without an accent.

On the other hand, *if* I taught them to use \language "français"
instead of "italiano", there certainly would be several of them who’d
forget the "ç" and type "francais". Accepting both means one minute
less spent investigating the error.
However, I can get behind the notion that user-friendliness has its
limits, and that making LilyPond more typo-tolerant ultimately doesn’t
help people to learn from their mistakes and to acquire some
much-needed coding discipline. (This is no dummy-oriented software --
we’re not inventing the iPad here :-)

Cheers,
Valentin.