Re: Macro pre-processing?

[Erik Sandberg]

On Friday 07 April 2006 00:50, Geoff Horton wrote:
> > Just read sections 11.1.3 and 11.1.6 in the manual.
>
> That's far more complicated than I want, and even further more
> complicated than a musician who's not a computer programmer is going
> to want to deal with--please note that those sections are in the
> chapter on "Interfaces for Programmers". Why should I have to know
> Scheme and the details of LilyPond implementation if all I want to do
> is save a little typing and come up with a less busy-looking input
> file?

I agree with you that this would be nice.

> LilyPond is powerful, and I'd like to see more of that power made more
> easily accessible. I'm not asking for changes to the basic syntax at
> all--anything I'd come up with would be a totally optional pre-pass
> system.

I have plans to make some improvent to the parser, in order to make \relative 
soft-codable. A side-effect of this will probably be that custom high-order 
music functions can be written; for example, you could add a function 
\define-function, to easily define a simple music function. It could work 
something like this:

\define-music-function {\foo \x \y} { c8 \x d8 \y }
...
{ \foo e16 {f g} }
=>
{ c8 e16 d8 {f16 g16} }

The usefulness of this kind of function is disputed among developers, so it 
might not become part of the official lilypond distribution.

-- 
Erik