Hi Kieren & Knute,
Personally, I use # [in such situations] for several reasons:
1. It makes the location of the value(s) more visually obvious to me, even in
editors (like Frescobaldi) with syntax colouring/highlighting.
2. It used to be required in certain places — and may still be, in a few places
I’m not currently able to name? — and thus using it everywhere [even if it’s
not strictly necessary] makes the code more consistent, and in any case is my
well-engrained habit.
Just for balance, here's my opinion, which is basically the opposite of
Kieren's: I view the syntax changes (due to David Kastrup I think) that
allow us to omit the # in most places where it used to be necessary as
an evolutionary advancement :-).
Since it hasn't been explained in this thread yet: The # character
enters "Scheme" mode, so what we enter after it is an expression in the
Scheme language. This allows for incredibly complicated programming
tasks, but should (in my opinion) not be necessary for entering e.g.
simply a number or a string without special characters. I'm happy about
every place where I don't have to use/see the # character.
So I write
\clef bass
\override Parentheses.font-size = -5.5
and so on, with the disadvantage being that sometimes I am forced to
break with this habit and do
\clef "violin_8"
and so on. For me, the most important situation in which I have to keep
in mind that the # is still needed basically always is markup mode: Since
\markup {
\fontsize 4
test
}
will fail, unfortunately, we still have to do \fontsize #4.
But of course I think there won't be a fight between Kieren and myself
about this :-), since it's just a matter of habit/taste and of where we
prefer to put the extra effort. I think it's kind of a "no free lunch in
the universe" situation.
Lukas
