Hi Lukas,
So glad to hear from someone with more understanding of what happens “under the
hood”.
> 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 :-).
I don’t disagree with that position at all — I also see it 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.
I also agree 100% with that position.
> 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.
It’s that failure — which usually ends up frustrating me by throwing an error
that I didn’t foresee and don’t fully understand — that keeps me putting #
where it’s not technically required.
> 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.
In addition to the other points on which we agree 100% ;), I imagine we’d both
agree that being able to omit # in literally every situation where we don’t
explicitly want to enter Scheme Mode™ would be a fabulous thing.
Cheers,
Kieren.
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