Re: significance of whitespace [WAS: LilyPond, Finale and Sibelius]

[Marc Hohl]

Despite the fact that it would cause massive problems in parsing, a line 
like

c4 4 4 4

is not quite readable for me.

As lilypond is THE tool for typesetting beautiful scores, the source 
file should
reflect the beauty. So I should be able to grasp the score at first sight,
and in my opinion, a distinct "repeat the last expression"-sign would
be the best solution.

To join the discussion about the "best" character, here are my 2 cents:

1) personally, I would use the "%", but this is the comment sign and 
can't be used.
   (perhaps this would be even possible, but ... NO!)

2) the "&" has a similar role in regular expressions as it would have in 
lilypond
   but I think not everyone using lilypond is familiar with grep and sed.
   The argument that it needs 2 keystrokes on most keyboards is not 
that important,
   because is will be used mostly as a shortcut for longer terms, so I 
will not write
   c4 & & & , but c4 c c c
   whereas <c e g>4 & & & ist faster to type than < c e g>4 < c e g > < 
c e g > <c e g >
   (and more readable, because otherwise I could just use the 
copy&paste function of
   my editor and forget about the rest)

3) why not use a "x" for eXpression, because the sign is meant not only 
to repeat
  "Qords", but everything reasonable?

Marc