Re: Understanding Lilypond

[Urs Liska]

Am 17.01.2015 um 14:13 schrieb Richard Shann:
> On Sat, 2015-01-17 at 13:37 +0100, Urs Liska wrote:
> > Concretely I see the problem in a sequence of related issues:
> >
> > - Scheme itself *is* difficult to get into
>
> actually, Scheme syntax is incredibly simple - Scheme expressions are
> lists (a b c) with the first element being the procedure and the
> subsequent ones the parameters. So if you come across (if a b) you look
> up the procedure "if" in the documentation, rather than having to learn
> a bunch of keywords (if, case, else ...) which have special syntax
> peculiar to them.

Yes. But the way until you get familiar with this simple foundation and 
with all its implications is incredibly steep.

> > - There are so many Scheme dialects,
>
> the only one relevant to LilyPond is the guile-1.8 interpreter. In
> Denemo we have moved on to guile-2.0 but I haven't come across other
> interpreters for Scheme, though I've noticed them mentioned in the Guile
> documentation.

Of course, but when you are searching for solutions, approaches or even 
tutorials on "Scheme" you'll get a bunch of different resources, some 
for Racket, some for MIT Scheme, some for guile-1.8, some for guile-2.0 
and so on. While often there is something to the solution that you can 
use for the problem at hand often the suggestions don't work in LilyPond 
- and you don't have a clue why.

The correct Scheme version is stated somewhere at the beginning of the 
Extending manual, but it's done so in a way that you will only 
understand the meaning of it after having learned quite some Scheme.

Urs

> HTH
>
> Richard


--
Urs Liska
www.openlilylib.org