Re: OT: pagenumber

[Andrew Bernard]

Hi Blöchl,

Although I am a programmer, I found the initial learning to have to use ##f and ##t for booleans, as a user wanting to get on and engrave music, obscure, difficult to remember, and easy to get wrong, what with the has escaped hash, even if you do read the manual carefully. Using booleans false and true is very much a programmers view of the world, but ‘civilians' generally don’t think in terms of boolean values to turn things on or off. [Set toaster operation mode to ##t.] I have been reflecting on this a little lately and it seems to me that in many cases where we are forced to specify a boolean the choice is between having something ‘on’ and having it ‘off’ - not having it. I am led to speculate if the possibility of providing off and on values would make it more intuitive for users not inclined to a programming mindset as much as Scheme and LISP pro’s.

Perhaps we could keep ##f and ##t for things like page numbering, but be generous minded and offer users some alternate ways of saying that as well. Yes I can see the arguments against this in the lilypond context, but is is a topic of some worth.

Andrew

On 5/03/2016, 19:51, "Blöchl Bernhard" <address@hidden on behalf of address@hidden> wrote:

Setting myself into the situation of a maybe user wanting to switch off the pagenumber…