Re: Just another boring question about manual cautionary accidentals...

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Valentin Villenave escreveu:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> after having spent months (if not years) wondering "why the hell has
> it to be the way it is?", today it's finally time for me to ask here
> if anyone knows any logical answer to the following question:
> 
> The most basic syntax, in LilyPond, is:
> 
> notename/accidental/octave/duration, right?
> ==> example: fis''2
> 
> So, if I understand correctly, all accidental-related stuff comes
> right after the note, but *before* the octave indication.
> Then why, when you want to add a cautionary accidental, do you have to put:
> 
> notename/accidental/octave/cautionary/duration
> ==> fis''!2
> instead of
> 
> notename/accidental/cautionary/octave/duration
> ==> fis!''2
> 
> and why has the later to cause the compilation to crash?
> 
> 
> Some of you might answer that since cautionary accidentals are not
> mandatory, it makes sense to put them afterwards, like one would do
> with expressive marks (wrong example: expressive marks come after the
> duration; the cautionaries are the *only* stuff which have to come
> between the octave and the duration).
> But you have to admit that it makes sense to put all
> accidental-related stuff together, such as fis!''2 (it's so natural to
> me that every time I write cautionaries, that means in every bar, I
> use this syntax, launch the compilation, and have to tell me "oh,
> right, I forgot"... before correcting it).
> 
> I'm not asking to change the whole LilyPond syntax of course; but is
> it unreasonable to ask if LilyPond could accept cautionaries before
> *and* after the octave indication? Or at least, ignore it and go on
> with the compilation?
> It wouldn't break anything, and it would make the syntax much more
> flexible and tolerant. It already is, in many ways:
> spaces-insensitiveness, ties notation where you can put the tildes
> wherever you want, bar checks when you want, and many cool features.

>From the top of my head, this is because ! and ? only make sense
for notes, where pitches make sense in a broader context. If you 
look at parser.yy, you see

  simple_element:
        pitch exclamations questions octave_check optional_notemode_duration 
optional_rest {

there is no place to store exclamations inside a pitch.

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