Re: Summary of \relative { q } ... analysis.

[David Kastrup]

Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> writes:

> As I've been watching this thread, the idea came to me that perhaps we
> ought to do away with q and replace it with a naked duration.

Same issues as with q regarding the lifetime of input, so this
suggestion is more or less orthogonal to the problems I discussed except
for picking option 1.

> So what if a naked duration just meant to repeat the previous chord or
> note, with the given duration, i.e.
>
> {c4 d e 8 <c e g>8 4}
>
> Would be equivalent to
>
> {c4 d4 e4 e8 <c e g>8 <c e g>4}

Spaces are not relevant in the parser (and since $x needs to get
separated from further input by a space, this is actually not just a
technicality).  So the above input is already valid and equivalent to

{c4 d e8 <c e g>8 4}

I think that this is a bit of a drawback...  Now you might want to
change this into "naked durations _not_ possibly belonging to the
previous input element".  In my opinion, we have more than enough
ambiguities in the LilyPond grammar already.  I don't really like that.

> It also makes the syntax work on both chords and non-chords, which
> seems to me to be a reasonable design objective.

Uh, the previous discussion revolving around q has made quite explicit
that people don't _want_ that, and q was explicitly changed at one time
in order to not do it.  It is common to have a fat chord (cumbersome to
enter) followed by a brief monophonic phrase of one or two notes, then
the same fat chord again.  Involving non-chords does not actually save
typing (c or q is pretty much the same effort).

> It treats durations and pitches in the input stream in an equivalent
> manner.  It has the potential downfall of making the input stream more
> confusing to read.

For humans _and_ LilyPond.

Let's not get there.

-- 
David Kastrup