Re: Proposed new available and recommended behavior of \relative

[Evan Driscoll]

On 3/7/2013 9:57 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
> That's a real tough test...  Asking someone who has just managed to get
> along with one convention to move to the next one.  Perhaps you should
> take this opportunity for asking someone who has not yet started working
> with LilyPond.

Well I don't quite fall into that category, but I am still new at it as
you may have been able to tell. :-)

So if you want my opinion, in some sense I'm not a fan of the proposal;
I don't really like the inconsistency of what ' and , mean between the
first pitch and subsequent pitches (as opposed to inside the block of
actual notes and outside). On the other hand, you already get ' and ,
meaning absolute stuff with octave checks already, but that's also not
directly adorning the note.


But at the same time, it's not a big deal one way or the other. I mean,
I do a lot of Python programming. It's a rather nice language for many
things and I like it a lot, but that doesn't mean I like every single
thing about it, or even don't think it does some things (e.g. True==1)
that are just dumb at a much deeper level than this proposal.


Although... bringing up the octave check made me think of an idea which
you could consider that seems like it could be a decent compromise if
there's a lot of disagreement on this isue, which is to treat an *octave
check* on the first pitch differently. From my understanding, normally
the octave check will cause Lilypond to emit a warning if the result is
unexpected and then set the octave to the indicated absolute pitch.
Well... if you just don't emit the warning if the first pitch in a
\relative {} block is incorrect, then it seems like you get exactly the
current proposal except that you have to spell \relative { c'' } as
\relative { c='' } instead.

Consider that a brainstorming idea... I could be missing something, and
maybe *everyone* will dislike it, or maybe it'd be harder to implement
or something like that. Just throwing it out there; I don't have any
real attachment to it.

Evan