On Tue 01 May 2018 at 09:15:31 (+0200), David Kastrup wrote: > David Wright <da...@lionunicorn.co.uk> writes: > > > On Tue 01 May 2018 at 00:15:24 (+0200), David Kastrup wrote: > >> David Wright <da...@lionunicorn.co.uk> writes: > >> > >> > AFAICT the important exception that was introduced with naked > >> > durations was that c 4 notates a single note whereas c4 4 notates two. > >> > >> There was no "exception" introduced. c 4 always indicated a single note > >> and c4 4 previously was invalid input. > > > > There's no guarantee that a new user, or a user who has only set eyes > > on notation like c4, will make the correct interpretation of, say, > > c 4 4 4 when they first encounter it. Without looking it up, there's > > no way of knowing whether LP would treat it as three notes or four. > > Without looking anything up, you cannot know the interpretation of anything.
LOL. I'm sorry, I have this vision of a child checking through the meanings of the dozen words they learned this week. > At any rate, I objected to an "exception" being "introduced" > since LilyPond continued behaving absolutely the same for any previously > valid input. Well, it helps to look at the sentence's context which you removed when you originally quoted it, viz: > The disadvantage is that introduce one exception and the exception has to > be specified in the manual. But when you start learning something new, you > concentrate on essentials things not on details/exceptions. Don't know if > other people work the same but this is how does it works for me. AFAICT the important exception that was introduced with naked durations was that c 4 notates a single note whereas c4 4 notates two. BTW although this point is explained in LM (page 23), I don't think it has made it into NR yet. So the context was "start learning something new": the learner's experience rather than the power user's. With this change in LP semantics, LM introduced this warning: "… but remember that a bare pitch followed by a space and a bare duration will be interpreted as a single note. In other words, c4 a 8 8 would be interpreted as c4 a8 a8, not as c4 a4 a8 a8. Write instead c4 a4 8 8 ." People learning LP 2.19.81 have to learn that every " 8 " is not the same. If the " 8 " follows a naked pitch, it is treated differently. People who learned with LP 2.18.2 did not have to learn that. I'm perfectly happy if you prefer not to see that a new learner might view it as an exception. After all, you're immersed in the language. > Spaces never ever were relevant. And we did not even > start putting spaces into the documentation where they hadn't been > before except in very particular circumstances (like drum notation using > always the same drum). > > > So if a new user thinks that a naked duration always specifies a note > > they're likely to see the first duration in c 4 4 4 as an exception. > > The first duration in c 4 4 4 is not a naked duration. It's not the > space which makes it "naked" but the lack of pitch to attach to. Where does it actually say that? > Let me quote the documentation on this: > > Isolated durations – durations without a pitch – that occur within a > music sequence will take their pitch from the preceding note or chord. > > \relative { > \time 8/1 > c'' \longa \breve 1 2 > 4 8 16 32 64 128 128 > } > > [music image] > > Isolated pitches – pitches without a duration – that occur within a > music sequence will take their duration from the preceding note or > chord. If there is no preceding duration, then default for the note is > always ‘4’, a quarter note. > > Nowhere does this talk about spaces. … which of course it should, if only to say that such whitespace is optional and not preferred. That would make it is clearer that c4 d e f 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 defines only 11 notes. The NR should be a reference for definitions like this, should it not. Similarly AFAICT, nowhere is it defined that you can write naked durations in lyrics, but that \skip 4 Hm!4 hm!4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 won't work for Papageno because it only generates blanks. Cheers, David. _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user