Re: Set indent based on instrument name (issue 6457049)

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 02:14:17PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> And if you think this is purely hypothetical, check out
> Documentation/snippets/incipit.ly.

David, thank you for identifying a specific problematic example.

> There are exceptions to every rule.  But if you are calling for an
> exception because you lack the skills for following the rule, it is
> unlikely that your skills are sufficient for correctly identifying the
> exception.

I think this is a bit too far.  Phil is trying to solve a
long-standing *extremely* annoying bug for documentation writers
which has not attracted much attention from "real" programmers.
He never claimed that he posses great skills, and he hasn't been
steeped in "minimize state" programmer culture of object-oriented
programming (to say nothing of functional programming!).  That's
why I used my analogy of nose picking, despite the fact that of
course there's reasons why it's ok in certain circumstances[1].
I figured that was a fast way to communicate that you really
shouldn't use them unless you know it's ok.

I don't think that he realizes that he's asking for an exemption,
so no need to be rude about it.  Please either give us some hints
about how to store the information in an acceptable manner, or
wait until Keith or Mike or somebody else has time to help.  Phil
is *precisely* the kind of person that we want to be helping with
lilypond, so please don't discourage him.

[1] for example, I use a static int in my FFT convolution class
because libfftw is not thread-safe and has a global variables as
part of their constructor/destructor.  :(

- Graham