Re: Issue 2702 in lilypond: Patch: Unify the lexer's idea of words and commands across all modes.

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 03:48:48PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Does this affect
> >
> > {
> >   \tempo 4. = 120 
> >   c2 d
> >   %\tempo "Adagio" 4. = 43.5
> >   \tempo "Adagio" 4. = 43
> >   e4. d8 c2
> > }
> >
> > ?
> 
> No.

(aside: do we want to disallow all decimals in metronome markings?
43.5 doesn't work.  I'm perfectly fine forbidding them, but some
contemporary composers might want to give exact values)

> >> \midi { \tempo "Moderato"
> >>           line-width = 100\mm }
> >> 
> >> will not work any more, since
> >> 
> >>           \tempo "Moderato" 4. = 56
> 
> Well, in the Midi block, \tempo "Moderato" is not exactly important.

> > hmm, I'm beginning to appreciated why C uses semicolons.  ;)
> 
> \tempo syntax is insane.  This is one thing that will eventually have to
> go.

ok, but are we stepping in the right direction here?  I mean, if
  \relative c' {
    \tempo "Allegro" 4. = 60
  }
works but
  \midi {
    \tempo "Allegro" 4. = 60
  }
fails, I wouldn't blame anybody for being surprised.

> Whitespace is whitespace in LilyPond without further significance, and
> we are _not_ going to change this against my very firm disapproval.  It
> would be the death knell for having LilyPond reasonably useful for
> computer-generated output, like exports from other music software.

I'm not seriously suggesting it, but I'd argue that significant
whitespace should have an insignificant effect on
computer-generated output.  I mean, sure it might take an extra
hour of debugging, but once you've got your exporter adding the
right number of spaces, it should work, right?  I think the real
problem would be non-technical users trying to write files,
potentially without a fixed-width font, and getting confused about
7 spaces vs. 8 spaces.

- Graham