Lilypond case-insensitivity (was: shall we rename X-offset)

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi Eluze (and everyone who'd like Lily to be case-insensitive),

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 12:10 AM, Eluze <address@hidden> wrote:
>janek.lilypond wrote
>> However, I think when discussing case-sensitiveness, we agreed to a
>> following convention: LilyPond should differentiate between upper- and
>> lowercase, but no commands/properties/etc. should differ only by case.
>
> so the validity of a command/property/etc. can be checked by setting both
> the user input and the internal LilyPond expectation to lowercase and that's
> it!
>
> with this we can write /down DoWn dOwN down DOWN/ or whatever
> contains these 4 letters in this order

Uh, have you read David's email
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2013-03/msg00448.html
?
The conversion between cases isn't as trivial as it seems.

I've reread previous discussion about case (in)sensitivity, and i can
say that making Lily case-insensitive really looks like a bad idea: if
we did this, significant amount of bugs and inconsistencies would
appear.  Many of them would be hard to predict and they'd cause us a
*lot* of trouble.  Please trust us (i.e. David and other experienced
developers) that the benefits of case-insensitivity are not worth the
troubles it would bring.

Nevertheless, there *are* other things that we could do to make
case-sensitivity more bearable.  LilyPond could give users hints about
spelling, for example if someone wrote \stemUP, LilyPond could say
something like "unknown string \stemUP.  Did you mean \stemUp?".  That
would be a good feature request.
Also, editors like Frescobaldi could provide some kind of
"LilyPond-spellchecker" that would correct wrongly spelled commands.

I think that such functions would greatly help users who struggle with
case-sensitivity, while not causing any problems that would appear if
we made LilyPond herself case-insensitive.

I hope this answer helps you.
Janek