Re: preliminary GLISS discussions

[Joe Neeman]

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 1:00 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

Joe Neeman <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 2:46 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>     Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:
>
>     > On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Han-Wen Nienhuys
>     <address@hidden> wrote:
>     >> To me, a Grand Input Syntax "fixing" of LilyPond, would amount
>     to
>     >> creating a syntax that strictly separates parsing and
>     interpretation.
>     >> This implies not only rethinking a lot of syntax, but also it
>     means
>     >> letting go of some of the flexibility and conciseness of the
>     current
>     >> format.
>     >
>     > This sound like a Right Thing to do, but i'm not knowledgeable
>     enough
>     > to know what the results would actually be. Examples appreciated
>     > (hopefully some examples will show in other discussions).
>
>
>     Well, one simple consequence would be that one can't define music
>     functions in a document (their definition is interpretation, their
>     use
>     is parsing).
>
> With the current syntax, this is certainly true. But if a music
> function's arguments were delimited syntactically somehow then we
> could parse without interpreting any music functions, right?

The argument list as such would require delimiting to make this work
independently from advance knowledge about the number of elements.
Which gets us to Scheme syntax.  The enthusiasm of people about this
kind of fully delimited syntax is about on par with the enthusiasm about
writing XML files manually.

Also the type of an argument is not necessarily known without consulting
the function signature.  As a silly example, try

var = \relative c'-3

\void\displayLilyMusic \var

Try guessing its output before running it.  Find an explanation.
Replace \displayLilyMusic with \displayMusic and corroborate your
explanation.

Isn't this an argument for delimiting the argument list? If you don't expect anyone to guess where it begins and ends correctly (and I didn't), doesn't that mean we should have a more explicit syntax?

Cheers,

Joe