Re: Arguments before or after command?

[Jeff Kingston]

I'm not sure that I understand this proposal completely, but
anyway here are a couple of questions:

(1) Does it allow "x sup 2" (or rather, "x \sup 2")?  If not,
equation writers will be unhappy.

(2) It may overload white space too much.  Remember, in documents
white space between objects is used to indicate lists of words
that go to make up a paragraph.  This is too well-entrenched to
be changed.  Lout is willing to tolerate its use for something
else immediately adjacent to a symbol with a left or right
parameter, but not elsewhere.  I'm very doubtful about trying
to import traditional functional language syntax into document
formatting.  When you write say

  f p1 p2 p3 p4

there is no syntactic clue given as to where the parameters
of f end and the following words begin.  This is true of
Lout as well, but the problem is less bad because at
worst there can be one positional parameter before f and
one after f.

Jeff

On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 12:18:52PM +0200, Cedric Sodhi wrote:
> 
> If you really want to stick with as few "special" symbols as
> possible and want to denote both, the named arguments and
> commands with an "@", what we could do is something like that
> 
> @CommandName @ANamedArgumentA ValueA @ANamedArgumentWithNameCollisionB
> ValueB { @ACommandWithNameCollisionUsedAsPositionalArgumentC }
> PositionalValueD