Re: Trill and nonstandard expressive mark

[Olivier Biot]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 12:28 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

Olivier Biot <address@hidden> writes:

>     Well, putting { ... } around it is wrong, for one thing: it turns
>     the
>     whole into sequential music.
>
> Bingo!
>
> This is the most counterintuitive syntactic element in LilyPond for
> newcomers (after Scheme). In most programming languages, curly braces
> are used for grouping commands, in LilyPond curly braces have a double
> life and can be used in one of their shapes as a shorthand for "define
> serial music" (as opposed to "define parallel music" which is done
> with double angle brackets. The double meaning of the curly braces in
> LilyPond is rather confusing and I still have the impression at times
> that things seem to work out of sheer luck when using curly braces.
>
> Is this double meaning of curly braces documented somewhere? I did not
> come across it in the online manuals so far.

What double life?  Within music, curly braces create sequential music.
What other meaning do you see?

First meaning of curly braces as "block delimiter", e.g. in:

\score {

  % Serial or parallel music goes here

  \layout {

    % Layout directives go here

  }

}

Second meaning as "serial music definition", e.g. as a music _expression_ that will be used in a voice within a score block:

theMusic = { c8 d e4-. f2 }

It is very difficult to disambiguate the meaning of the curly braces without looking at where they will eventually appear.

Best regards,

Olivier