Re: Context paths (and the Edition Engraver)

[Dan Eble]

On Jan 21, 2020, at 14:37, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> StaffGroup = "organ" . Staff = "upper" . Voice . SubVoice = 2

OK.  It would be an understandable growth on the current face of LilyPond. :)

Questions follow, but I'm not asking you to spend time investigating.

Do you think we could achieve making the quotes optional for some simple IDs, 
and making the whitespace optional?

    StaffGroup=organ.Staff=upper.Voice.SubVoice=2

In a situation where the user didn't care to constrain the context types, do 
you think could they be omitted, or would we have to invent a placeholder?

    =organ.=upper..=2
    X=organ.X=upper.X.X=2

Maybe--MAYBE--I'm not yet advocating it, but maybe we could allow some 
ambiguity when there is no equal sign, and define how LilyPond resolves it; 
like if it is a context type then it is used as the context type, otherwise it 
is used as an ID, which would allow things like this:

    organ.upper.Voice.2

> Does this give us a hook into making \set, \override and/or \tempo a
> music function in the long run?  Less than sure about that.
> Particularly \tempo appears rather tricky.

If I ever knew enough about the implementation of those to answer, I've 
forgotten it.
— 
Dan