Re: tutorial and relative

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Graham Percival escreveu:
>>   * only tell novices about relative mode, because that is what you'll
>>     use anyway (apropos: we have made several attempts to make \relative
>>     the default, and introduce an \absolute keyword/mode for expert
>>     use, eg algorithmic composition.  we still may make this switch
>>     when we see a clean possibility for doing this)
> 
> !!!
> That's the first I've heard about this.  I wanted to avoid introducing
> \relative mode in the early stages, since it's more complicated that
> absolute pitches.
> 
> Hmm... actually, this could work.  I'd like to hear from other people,
> too: should the tutorial *only* discuss \relative ?  It would be quite
> nice if we could tell people "unless otherwise specified, all examples
> in the notation manual are implicitly inside".
> 
> \relative c' {
> %%% printed text
> }
> 
> (as for a clean possibility to change this: if we make the next release
> 3.0, we don't need to worry so much about breaking people's files :)
> 

I doubt whether this will be possible at all.  Various constructs
cannot work well together with relative and must operate on absolute
arguments, eg.

 \transpose
 \keepWithTag
 \removeWithTag

If we have relative mode as a default, we must insert implicit
\relative commands in a lot of places.  Implicit \relative's will make
the parser unpredictable, and I think that that's a bad thing.

I agree that

 { c d e }

looks better than

 \relative { c d e }

but I'm not sure if it's a major hurdle.

If anything, I think we should be looking to remove the optional pitch
argument, and force people to specify the octave in the first note
following \relative.

Finally, IIRC, Erik has been working on some parser modifications that
makes \relative soft-codable. Perhaps he has words to weigh in on this
subject. 

-- 

Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen

LilyPond Software Design
 -- Code for Music Notation
http://www.lilypond-design.com