Re: Syntax change proposal:

[David Kastrup]

"Trevor Daniels" <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote Thursday, July 26, 2012 6:03 PM
>
>
>> It's much simpler than that.  Expressions are "greedy": what can become
>> a part of them, will.  For that reason, it may make sense to enclose
>> simple music in braces, or it is likely to integrate durations and
>> postevents not intended for it.
>> 
>> For argument parsing it might be nice if { single-music-event } would
>> not turn into sequential music, similar to how #{ single-music-event #}
>> doesn't, so that you can make music arguments unambiguous without
>> causing them to be wrapped in sequential music.
>
> For argument parsing I'd prefer to make spaces significant.

\longa. rather than \longa . ?  I think that the duration identifiers
are the most likely candidates followed by spaces before dots.  On the
other hand, they can't be confused with unsigneds.

As I said, I'd prefer having reals not end in dots.  But chord modifiers
are a nuisance, anyway.

> The basic problem is having to parse a set of arguments with no
> delimiters to separate them.  This is never going to be easy or
> satisfactory, given the complex existing syntax, and will lead
> inevitably to user surprises.  Keith spotted this one; I'd be
> surprised if it were the only one.

There are other things:

\displayMusic \displayMusic c-4

Is it

\displayMusic (\displayMusic (c-4))

or

\displayMusic ((\displayMusic c)-4)

or

(\displayMusic \displayMusic c)-4 ?

Stuff like that is not really easy to resolve.

-- 
David Kastrup