Re: Proposed new available and recommended behavior of \relative

[Jim Long]

On Sat, Mar 09, 2013 at 12:49:31PM -0500, Paul Morris wrote:
> 
> As someone mentioned, it might be helpful to explain things in
> the docs something like the following:  If there is no explicit
> reference pitch, the first note defaults to being relative to f

Yet another death knell to my earlier post.  :)

But:

> I would say yes.  But seems like there is another question:
> 
> a2) should \relative { ... }  be the default/recommended approach as 
> presented in the docs?
> 
> I'm leaning slightly towards yes on this, but it's probably worth sitting 
> with it for a bit.

I think 'recommended' is going too far.  At least, I can't see
that one is always or nearly always better than the other.  David
made some examples of when the proposal could be better, but I
don't know that anyone has tried to make counter-examples of when
an explicit reference pitch would be "better".  Further, I think
the very definition of "better" is subjective to the needs and
style of the user.  I'd vote for documentation that presented
both modes of \relative without deprecation.  If the code base
prefers to use one or the other, that's the choice of the code
base maintainers, since they are Lily users also.  Their choice
may sway the readers of the documentation, but if so, let that
persuasion happen by example, rather than by dictum.  But we do
agree on your suggested course of action!  :)

> > b) should convert-ly make user code walk through that door once?
> 
> Hmmm...  If people have been using an explicit reference pitch, nothing 
> changes in that case.  So it's just if they have *not* been using one (which 
> has been deprecated, right?) that convert-ly will need to either 
> 
> 1) possibly change the octave of the first pitch inside { ... }
> 2) possibly add an explicit reference pitch.  
> 
> I'm not sure which is better, and maybe this is getting ahead of ourselves.

You seem to imply or at least I'm infering that you believe
having convert-ly convert:

\relative d'' { c d e f g a b c }

to:

\relative { c'' d e f g a b c }

ought to be eliminated from consideration.  I agree with that,
but I'm not sure that such a convert-ly rule is beyond
possibility.  I would rather not have convert-ly change any use
of \relative with an explicit reference pitch.