On Sun, 17 May 2015 04:58:22 -0700, <tdanielsmu...@googlemail.com> wrote:
The proper name for this would \absoluteWithFixedOctaveOffset, but that's too long and the acronym is similarly uninspiring. All three of the proposed options appear in this name, so the question is, "Which alludes most memorably to the actual function?". At the risk of going round in circles, on reconsidering in this light, I rather favour retaining \absolute. The other terms are modifiers to the primary function; the offset is both apparent and optional, "absolute" is used in the text and is an established concept.
The word "absolute" is established in the docs and in the user community to mean the method of entering pitches where octave marks ' and , count octaves from the "small octave" of Helmholtz notation, so the octaves are indicated against an absolute reference. As Carl pointed out, a function that applies an octave offset changes that reference, so is different from "absolute". The two functions \fixed and \relative each convert user input into absolute pitches. \relative applies octave marks relative to the previous pitch; \fixed adds octave marks to those of a fixed pitch. The primary function of the music-function \absolute is to write a stretch of absolute pitches within \relative, but the primary function of \fixed will be to choose the fixed octave from which entered octave marks count. I switched the name in the patch from \absolute to \fixed when I made the function skip over any enclosed \relative section. The docs say the starting pitch in \relative is an absolute pitch, and I didn't want to start making the distinction of "absolute octaves" versus "the octave established by the enclosing absolute" so I made the change \absolute c'' {c e g \relative c, {c e g} } => c''4 e'' g'' c' e' g' \fixed c'' {c e g \relative c, {c e g} } => c''4 e'' g'' c, e, g, For some reason I find the word 'fixed' easier to type than 'absolute' I started looking ahead at further documentation, and found \fixed more natural https://codereview.appspot.com/235010043/diff/120001/Documentation/learning/tutorial.itely but I backed away from adding anything to the Tutorial because \relative is enough to learn there. BTW, I started replacing @lilypond[relative=2] with complete examples https://codereview.appspot.com/237340043/ I replaced with explicit \relative, but the patch set is a quick way to skim the examples in the Learing Manual where we chose to hide the '\relative' and imaging how \fixed or \absolute might work. _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel