Hi Jean,
FWIW, the last one
a4_boringly
is something I wouldn't do, since
a_boringly
does not work
Yes, d'accord.
Personally, I tend to leave out # when possible for numbers,
and also leave out #' for symbols when possible because it
is not only shorter, but allows the syntax highlighting program
to highlight them specially if they're built-ins, be it
in Frescobaldi or in the documentation via Pygments.
On the other hand, I usually use " marks (but not # when
not required) around strings, because I might want to add
spaces in them, and once again because it makes the syntax
highlighting more useful.
For \new Staff = <this>, I never settled my mind :-) It
expects a string, but then one could argue that accepting
a symbol here would more sense.
I see it mostly from a "didactical" perspective: LilyPond syntax is
hermetical enough as it is (if you're looking at it from a
non-CS/Math/... person's perspective), and having to write #' is just
something that I want to avoid having to explain and justify to my
musician colleagues as long as possible.
It may be trivial, but to me,
\override NoteHead.color = red
actually lowers the barrier immensely compared with
\override NoteHead #'color = #red
- of course that's more than one syntax simplificiation here, but it
shows how much David's improvements have improved accessibility.
But, as I said before: Making everything seem perfectly simple (no #, no
', no "") is bound to put the user in a situation sooner or later where
things are not so simple anymore, and we have to explain why they need
to use additional symbols in their specific case. But in any case, I'm
much more inclined to explain about string delimiters "" than about #'.
Lukas
