Re: \relative proposal: putting absolute pitches anywhere within \relative block using @-sign

[Olivier Biot]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:44 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

Olivier Biot <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 8:24 PM, <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>     Examples:
>
>     1. { c4 c' c@'' c@, }
>
>     These are interpreted as absolute pitches, so the @-signs are
>     redundant here.
>     They could be silently ignored, or the at signs could be an error
>     outside of \relative blocks.
>
>     What do people think?
>
> Hmmm... I'd use the @ sign as a prefix, not as a suffix, as in:
>
> { c4 c' @c'' @c, }
>
> However, more fundamentally, I think the entire discussion relates to
> the intent of \relative and the current use seen by the LiliPond
> community.
>
> I'd rather see \relative { @c4 c' c'' c, } than \relative { c4 c' c''
> c, } in cases when the first pitch is supposed / expected to be an
> absolute pitch.

What else is it supposed to be?

e.g, a relative pitch. It could be used e.g. for transposition. The problem remains in that it's hard to determine where we should pin the starting pitch to an absolute pitch, since there are several successful recipes we can think of: default reference pitch, transposition, start with an absolute pitch.
 

> However there is no fundamental need for the first pitch being an
> absolute pitch in the first place.

It can be relative to f if we want to.  That adds the least amount of
information to the first pitch.

Depends on what we want to achieve. I tend to think in terms of "why am I using this"...
 

> Maybe we must work on the intent of \relative first.

I have a hard time imagining what that is supposed to mean if we assume
that we haven't been doing it so far.

We have, but maybe not always as explicitly.

Best regards,

Olivier