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

[David Kastrup]

Valentin Villenave <address@hidden> writes:

> 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".

Seriously?  I mean, no German would think about leaving off umlauts from
a letter under any circumstance, and we don't have anything akin to the
Académie française coming after us with German Shepherds (I'd actually
want a Fraktur police going after people who think they are looking
oldfashioned rather than illiterate by using signs with ligatures
amounting to Gas-ts-tube rather than Gast-stube).

So one can forget "ç" in French?  Wow.  How did that come about?

> 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.

Well, it's not really "coding discipline".  It's just reducing the
number of gratuitous deviations.  Strictly speaking, it may be
considered confusing that we don't accept "English" as notename language
when "english", the only spelling accepted by LilyPond, is not a
well-formed English word.

But capitalization seems like a much more subtle thing than a lack of
cédille.

> (This is no dummy-oriented software -- we’re not inventing the iPad
> here :-)

Shrug.  Many input syntax simplifications may be called
"dummy-oriented".  I don't see the point in educating people about
gratuitous seeming restrictions/limitations and their technical
underpinnings.  It becomes annoying after a few hundred times.

But "francais" seems like something we can do without.  Particularly
when its main purpose is not throwing an error when writing "ré".

-- 
David Kastrup