Writing a converter

[Aleksandr Andreev]

Hello list members,

I have a number of LilyPond scores that I have put together in Kievan
square notation. I am interested in creating a utility (a script) that
would automatically convert between square notation and common (round)
notation.

The conversion itself would be fairly trivial -- for example, I would
need to replace \KievanVoice with \Voice. There are also some custom
functions that I have created for correct spacing that need to be
replaced with slurs, e.g.,
\melisma { foo bar baz } needs to become foo ( bar baz )

Finally, I would want the round notation music transposed to the key of D.

I could write something like this in Perl or Python from scratch, but
it seems that such a script would need to be at least minimally aware
of the LilyPond syntax (for example one would expect it to ignore
commented out LilyPond code).

Thus, I am wondering if there is a simpler way to accomplish this. For
example, would I be able to write some convert rules and adapt
convert-ly to this task?

Thanks,

Aleksandr