On 16 Aug 2005, at 15:18, Erik Sandberg wrote:
The comparison between TeX/LaTeX and Lilypond is not completely
relevant.
Lilypond uses a different development model. You can see the
current lilypond
as a less generic TeX, with most of LaTeX's functionality hardcoded
into it.
Lily is gradually refactoring so that more and more of the
hardcoded stuff
can get softcoded. In this process, we sometimes sacrifice backward
compatibility (which some of our users rightfully dislike). One
possible
effect of this, could be that lilypond gradually turns into a
"TeX2", instead
of needing to be rewritten.
I just wanted a picture to focus. Making LilyPond more and more soft-
coded, striving for a smaller and smaller kernel, seems good. It will
not only increase generality, but also reduce the amount of bugs.
When you know more about the different features, perhaps a better
syntax would be in place. I do not know exactly what it would be;
just a hunch. A thing that you may not have thought about, is that it
seems important to get all this old music into the computer, in just
some representation. Once one has that, making translations to new
formats, at least in essential parts, should be fairly easy. It is
then probably good if as much as possible of typesetting rendering
can be automated, both simplifying authoring and the input format.
But TeX was developed once, too. Its author got tired, putting the
lid on further development, having the copyright. It could happen
with LilyPond, too, if one arrives the point where one has the
reached limits of the current setup.
Hans Aberg
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