Dan Eble <dan@lyric.works> writes: > Saul Tobin wrote at > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2024-12/msg00048.html, > >> In English, I would also use the term "note value" >> ... >> to describe something like "dotted quarter." > > I have been surfing the web reading about duration and I find sources > pushing me in different directions about whether "note value" refers > strictly to a power-of-two fraction of a whole note or also includes a > number of dots. For example, the notes { c4 c4. } have different > durations; do they also have different note values? > > I can't tell whether people disagree about the meaning of the term or > it's just being misused in some cases.
Personally, I would consider it a bad idea to change "duration" here. It is used pervasively in LilyPond and is "good enough". I don't see that the immense cost of changing it would ever see reasonable payback. It doesn't help that in programming "value" is totally unrelated to musical terms and has lots of meanings. For example, we have default values, grob values, return values, expected values, call-with-values, value->lily-string and so on. Even with the prefix "note", this is going to end in a situation that is not really making for good convert-ly foo and readable code. -- David Kastrup
