Re: sharping naturals

[David Raleigh Arnold]

On Mon, 10 Aug 2015 13:47:34 +0200
David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

> Thomas Morley <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > If I understand correctly your proposal is that
> >
> > \language "english"
> >
> > m = { ff' f' fs' }
> >
> > \m
> > \follow fs \m
> > \follow ff \m
> >
> > will be printed different.
> 
> Well, it would be more likely
> 
> \follow <fs> \m
> \follow <ff> \m
> 
> here.  That would be _one_ basic idea of implementation.  This
> one would mark non-explicit pitches c d e f g a b specially so
> that \follow can distinguish them from cn dn en fn gn an bn.
> The "unspecificness" would be kept in the music.  How and when
> should it get resolved when there is no \follow involved at
> all?  What happens if we \transpose music containing unspecific
> pitches?

Why make it hard? The aim is just to have the option of
\follow-ing the key signature, and that must be all done before
\transpose or any other choices are made.
> 
> Another implementation would be to keep the music expressions
> unambiguous and instead use a different notename language
> variant, perhaps invoking it like
> 
> \language \key a \major "english"
> 
> which will redefine all "unspecific" note names in
> correspondence with the key.  Or maybe just
> 
>     \languagekey a \major

It's just a 14 item hash table for each language. The "n" could
be the same everywhere, since it's in no language anyway, or, if
I'm wrong about that, make it 15 items.
> 
> That will basically make the typical document be written in a
> large variety of notename languages which makes for a lot of
> fun when editing and/or copy/pasting motives around.

This is an advantage of keeping it an editing tool. You have a
few now, none as useful as this, to me anyway. 
> In
> particular, editing functionality like that of Frescobaldi
> (which may be asked to transpose passages for the user) will
> become unreliable, and the inability of an external tool to
> figure out the right pitches without context of course is
> matched by a similar potential for confusing users.

Again, without \key, \follow makes no sense.
 
> 
> > In my thinking that's absolute crude.
> > Though, obviously there are other opinions about that.
> >
> > Patches are always welcome.
> 
> But one needs to be warned that they may meet resistance to
> acceptance, so there is some sense in figuring out the other
> developers' opinions before investing a lot of work, at least
> if one's ultimate goal is the inclusion as an integral part of
> the standard LilyPond distribution.
> 
> A somewhat smaller but comparable can of worms is \relative
> mode. A frequent topic on the mailing list is "how do I make my
> music functions work in \relative mode?" and often answers are
> not straightforward.  Many LSR snippets work only either in
> absolute mode or in relative mode, and not necessarily reliably
> so.

An editing tool should do the conversion before lilypond goes
cattywampus. And what is the purpose of \relative? To save typing.
> 
> So it is pretty much established that the music-based approach
> comes with a healthy load of problems, and the input language
> based approach, while condensing most of the problems in one
> place, makes source code management a headache because each
> source code passage comes with its own associated input
> language.

The inclusion of \relative or \follow need not cause difficulties
if conversions from them can be supplied to the user as
part of the editing process. Both are basically editing tools
which need not be allowed to cause problems with ensuing
processes.

Kindest regards, Rale



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