Re: \repeat unfold behavior

[Urs Liska]

Am 04.08.2011 20:35, schrieb David Kastrup:
> "Christopher R. Maden"<address@hidden>  writes:
>
> > On 08/04/2011 01:21 PM, Patrick Karl wrote:
> > > I discovered that the \repeat unfold 2 in:
> > >
> > > \relative a' { \repeat unfold 2 {a' b c} }
> > >
> > > is not equivalent to:  a' b c   a' b c
> > >
> > > but rather to:           a' b c   a b c
> > >
> > > That surprised me.  I have not been able to find any documentation in
> > > Notation about this behavior.
> > The opposite would have surprised me; if my repeats climbed an octave on
> > every iteration, it would make life difficult.  I’d run out of buttons
> > on my concertina pretty quickly. (-:
> >
> > Without delving into the internals, I have a very strong suspicion that
> > the notes are given their absolute pitch before the repeat is unfolded.
> >   If you want to climb an octave with each iteration, you’ll need to
> > explicitly say so or write some kind of function.
> blurb = {a' b c}
> \new Voice { \time 3/4 \relative a' { \blurb \blurb }
>               \relative a' \repeat unfold 2 \blurb }
>
> The difference _is_ interesting.
While the behaviour is very useful, I'd say it isn't absolutely logical. 
One really might expect repeats to work like you wrote in the first line 
- and as the OP expected.
So it might be useful to clarify this in the docs.
I'm not quite sure how to write it, so I don't make a documentation 
suggestion myself. But it should be somehow along the line that the 
repeat doesn't work like writing down the same thing twice ("\blurb 
\blurb") but repeats the musical expression in a more 'musical' sense. 
Well - this is put really bad, but that's what I meant ...

Best
Urs