Re: New argument types (Was: Constructive Criticism and a Question)

[Bertalan Fodor]

When I was writing the Antlr version of the parser I realized that extending 
the grammar in dozens of ways makes much more complicatons and unreadability 
than you gain in compactness. Actually I don't like that I almost have to 
reimplement LilyPond just to be able to decide if an input is syntactically 
correct. :-)

So I'd always prefer extensions that do not change the syntax. But I may be not 
right.

Bert



> ------- Original Message -------
> From: address@hidden
> To: Erik Sandberg <address@hidden>
> Sent: 07. 01. 08., 5:54:21
> Subject: New argument types (Was: Constructive Criticism and a Question)
> 
> On Sun, 7 Jan 2007, Erik Sandberg wrote:
> 
> > BTW, one of the biggest problems (IMHO) in the lilypond language is that
> > we can't extend the parser to accept durations as parameters to music
> > functions:  \foo c 4. is ambiguous; it's unclear whether the 4. is the
> > c's duration, or if it's a separate argument.
> 
> It's probably unfortunate that the choice was made to tolerate spaces in
> things like
>       c 4. ~
> but I'm sure that that cannot be undone at this point.
> 
> Increasing the number of different argument types for music functions
> would almost certainly be extremely useful for users, who, judging from
> this mailing list, seem to have an unlimited imagination when it comes to
> wanting to be able to extend LP syntax.
> 
> Since recognizing a duration expression is purely a notational problem
> (in the sense that a notation has to be found that will be unambiguous for
> the parser), it might be worth asking for people's ideas.  The things I
> can think of offhand are the following --
> 
>    \foo c (4.)     % no good -- confusion with slurs
>    \foo c \nul 4.  % \nul would be a sort of syntactic "breath mark"
>    \foo c \ 4.     % \ -- same idea as \nul (short, but maybe risky?)
>    \foo c \\ 4.    % \\ -- same as \nul
>    \foo c =4.      % = prefixed to any expression: "this is separate item"
> 
> -- Tom
> 
> 
> 
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