Hello all. This may be off-topic, I'm not sure. I've used LilyPond a bit and it engraves music very nicely, however, I have one fundamental difference of philosophy that might fit into this discussion: the language for the files is procedural, not declarative. This comes up because someone mentioned the constantly-changing syntax -- a serious barrier to wider adoption, no doubt! I believe the syntax changes are because the language is procedural; they reflect the changes to LilyPond's internal workings, which I see as a bad thing -- it would be better if the user (and the input file) could be insulated from that.
My bias is toward declarative because it encodes information, not instructions. I wrote my thesis on the topic of transforming one format into another -- loosely taken, this means "music information retrieval." To be most useful, I believe music files ought to simply state *what* is there, and let the engraver decide *how* to engrave it. I know this is an over-simplification, but for the sake of brevity I'll leave it at that. That said, how about the list of to-do things includes "write translators from other formats to LilyPond?" There are vast bodies of work in other formats. Translation probably wouldn't be perfect, but it might be good enough to save a lot of work. Thanks Baron -- Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand! _______________________________________________ Lilypond-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
