Re: tuplet stats

[Simon Albrecht]

On 26.09.2016 04:55, David Kastrup wrote:
> Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > On 9/25/16, 2:46 PM, "Simon Albrecht" <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > > On 25.09.2016 22:06, Trevor Daniels wrote:
> > > > When needed, isn't this adequate?
> > > >
> > > > \version "2.19.48"
> > > > triplet = \tuplet 3/2 \etc
> > > > \triplet { a'4 a' a' }
> > > That¹s what I meant by ‘implementation is a no-brainer’ :-)
> > > Best, Simon
> > I¹m generally opposed to syntactic sugar.  It tends to hide behavior that
> > is important to know to move beyond the basics.

I also proposed the change because I think this is easy to grasp and 
document: At the _end_ of the section on \tuplet, one can add a remark 
that \tuplet 3/2 may be written as \triplet. So everybody will be well 
aware that \triplet is \tuplet 3/2 and cannot be used for anything like 3/5.

> \triplet saves very little input, it does not actually cover all
> triplets (like the rare 3/5 triplets) and it does not generalize well to
> things like quintuplets which can really be 5/4 or 5/3 depending on
> metre.

It’s just that \tuplet 3/2 is the most common form by magnitudes. I 
daresay 3/5 might be like 1000 times less common, but that may be due to 
the repertoire I’m working on. At any rate I don’t think it’s going to 
cause any confusion.

> So I'm a bit meh on it even though I don't consider it GLISSful.  Its
> cost is small but I don't see it as overly helpful either.  But then I
> am writing on a US keyboard layout where 3/2 can be typed with 3 key
> strokes and no modifiers (Shift, AltGr or whatever).

For me (German neo2 layout) it’s 6 key strokes (Mod4+. Mod3+i Mod4+,) 
[1], but whether it’s 3, 4 or 6 key strokes doesn’t really matter so 
much. Let me give an example: In my current project I have a section 
where many bars look like this:
b \tuplet 3/2 { a'4 g8 }
And with many instances of \tuplet 3/2 it does reduce typing and visual 
clutter to just have \triplet instead (which can also be autocompleted).

Now I might just write
triplet = \tuplet 3/2 \etc
in a library file of mine, but for once I like to keep such private 
syntax at minimum level to simplify sharing code, and I thought that it 
might help others as well.

Best, Simon

[1] That sounds terrible, but normally the layout is extremely handy 
(well, for German text more so than for English…), especially for 
Lilypond code, since all the \/{}[]<> and numbers are very easy to type.