Re: Syntax change proposal:

[Trevor Daniels]

David Kastrup wrote Thursday, July 26, 2012 9:16 PM


> "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 . ?  

Yup, no problem with that.

> As I said, I'd prefer having reals not end in dots.

I'd be happy with that restriction too.
  
> But chord modifiers are a nuisance, anyway.

I can see that, but do we ever need reals in chordmode?

>> 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
> Stuff like that is not really easy to resolve.

That would worry me less.  Just choose one of your interpretations
and document it.  Although if it is possible to use ( ) or { } to
clarify the order of evaluation that would be better.

Trevor