Re: Contemporary music documentation

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 10:08:02PM +0100, Neil Puttock wrote:
> 2009/9/4 Carl Sorensen <address@hidden>:
> 
> > setInstrumentName =
> > #(define-music-function (parser location instrument-name) (string?)
> >  #{
> >    \set Staff.instrumentName = $instrument-name
> >  #})
> 
> I'm not in favour of this type of substitution function; I hope it's
> not indicative of the kind of approach we'll be pursuing in GLISS.

It's not necessarily the approach we'd be pursuing.  We haven't
decided what approach to take, precisely, and we *won't* even be
starting that discussion for another week or two.

If that copyright fuss hadn't been started, I might have initiated
the discussion it this weekend.  But as it is, we've already used
up half of Septembrer's quota for huge non-work discussions.

> Apart from cluttering the source with syntactic sugar constructs, this
> hard-codes inflexibility which is detrimental to users' understanding
> of LilyPond.  We already have too many predefined commands which rely
> on particular contexts; imagine a user wanting to set an instrument
> name for a PianoStaff: the above is useless in this situation.

Those are extremely good points.  In the interests of a full
discussion (on a separate mailist, to avoid cluttering -devel),
I'm not going to announce that we *won't* do this kind of thing,
but unless the proponents of such an approach have terrifically
good reasons to counter or override the above, I can't imagine
going ahead with it.

Cheers,
- Graham