commands list and syntax

[hernan gonzalez]

I'm trying to undestand better the lilipond syntax, but the
documentation is confusing for me, in several respects:
For one (for the first) thing: The "Commands index"
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.10/Documentation/user/lilypond/LilyPond-command-index
is supposed to be "an index of all LilyPond \commands".
Now, that list (besides being non-categorized, with the "important"
commands buried among lots of gregorian-stuff and such) does not
include a lot of very basic commands (\score \midi  \markup
\appoggiatura \version ! ) .
Or am I missing something and those are not "commands" ?


Perhaps i have not read at depth the docs, but I have used Lilypond
for a time, I'm a software programmer (not Scheme, though), and the
basic concepts of the language/syntax (identifiers, variables, macros,
commands, functions, blocks... ) are still somewhat puzzling for me.

In some example in the docs, it is stated:
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.10/Documentation/user/lilypond/Saving-typing-with-identifiers-and-functions

... we've seen static substitution – when LilyPond sees \padText, it
replaces it with the stuff that we've defined it to be (ie the stuff
to the right of padtext=).

(actually that "at the right" seems misleading to me ; it's actually
the "block" or "atom" following the = sing. I think that that concept
should be more explained in the docs. If I understand weel, the braces
are used not just to enclose "expressions" or "fragments of music")

That phrase  led me to think that we have in general a textual macro,
something like  a #define in C. But if i write

myitalic = \italic
a^\markup{ \myitalic hi}

it does not compile, in spite of this being valid:

a^\markup{ \italic hi}

That command index, besides, links to the relevant page of the
documentation. It would be nice to have somewhere some kind of
reference of all the commands with their syntax (arguments;  and
context, if relevant).

--
Hernán J. González
http://hjg.com.ar/musica/ghibli/