thoughts

[Orm Finnendahl]

Hi,

 I just wanted to add to my recent comments. It might seem that my
posts are unadequately critical. Although they are fueled by my
frustration using the program I want to make clear that I really
appreciate the tremendous and excellent work which has been done so
far by the developers! Part of the frustration is due to my incomplete
knowledge of the program and another part is due to the fact that
music engraving is such an incredibly complex thing.

I still haven't come to terms with suggestions how to improve the
situation. Lilypond's baroque syntax seems to indicate to me the still
unresolved issue of the "proper" mix of generalization and individual
requirements and the definition of semantic and syntactic markup when
it comes to notation (all other notation programs have the same
problems -wrapped up in some sort of gui to make it less obvious-
which shows that it is a non-trivial issue).

As it is somewhat crucial for my own work to be able to have some
definition of the music which survives the next few generations of
hard- and software development (and don't break like many of the
scores at mutopia) I will for sure keep thinking about it. Especially
as I tend to think that lilyponds syntax could get more consistent
which eventually would result in the dilemma of a redefinition
breaking even more old sources.

Anyway: Apolgies for unfair criticism and hopefully I will be able to
be more constructive in the future. The more I learn about the inner
workings of lilypond, the clearer I might get.

Until then keep up the good work and don't get mad at me when I get
mad at the program ;-)

--
Orm

P.S.: Maybe one thing: Apart from suggesting to rewrite lilyponds
parser from scratch it would be a tremendous thing if lilypond could
get rid of some TeX related restrictions, especially the limitation to
alphabetic characters in definitions. It would make things so much
easier being able to use underscores and numbers in definitions! Is it
really that hard to do (is lilypond really still using the TeX parser
and does that actually mean you have to write the parser from
scratch)?