Re: Why no numbers allowed in variables?

[David Kastrup]

Thomas Morley <address@hidden> writes:

> Am Di., 2. Okt. 2018 um 23:17 Uhr schrieb David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>
>> So what is wrong with using \"var2" or \var.2 ?
>
> Ah, I forgot about var.1 etc
>
> Ofcourse below is a bit ugly I'd say:
>
> val.1 = "foo"
> <<
>   \new Staff \repeat unfold 4 c'4
>   \new Lyrics \lyricmode { \val.1 4 \val.1 2 \val.1 4 }
>>>
>
> Another possibility is to use superscript like
> val² = ...
> Ofcourse it's soso...
> It works not because it's supported but because it's not disallowed.
> Which may change in the future.

It would be pretty unusual to make non-syntactical characters gain
additional meaning.

We did get some puzzlement from people (notably Valentin) when stuff
like c_° became a valid identifier (it previously was equivalent to
c_"°" ).  But that was not as much a matter of special-treating ° as it
was of new rules for _ in the formation of identifiers.

It's conceivable that there would be some unicode unification at some
point of time (like some operating systems have for file names) so that
an umlaut written as a letter of its own or formed using a diacritical
combining character would be treated identically.  But I don't think we
should go much beyond that.

-- 
David Kastrup