Re: preliminary GLISS discussions

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 12:04 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 8:27 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>>> It is reasonably easy to state "this will have to go".  However, I have
>>> not so far attempted a replacement since I am still fuzzy on
>>> assignments.  Basically I want to have the equivalent of procedures with
>>> setters for LilyPond at one point of time, being able to write things
>>> like
>>>
>>> (set! (array-ref violin 1) #{ ... #})
>>>
>>> as
>>>
>>> \violin 2 = ...
>>>
>>> In order _not_ to have _syntactical_ categories like "vector of music"
>>> hardwired into the syntax, this requires parsing of functions
>>
>> Again, I would argue that people that know what a vector is, and how
>> to use it will be better served by writing scheme directly.
>
> You can also argue that people that know what a duration is, and how to
> use it will be better served by writing Scheme directly.  Because a
> duration is complex enough in Scheme already.

The whole idea of integrating pure Scheme expressions, ie. #(+1 2),
into LilyPond was to avoid the complexity of having to invent another
programming language. I have many issues with the GUILE project, but I
think they are dead right in one aspect: there is a cost to designing
a programming language. It seems this text was removed from the main
GNU GUILE site, but you can still find it here:
http://gnu.gds.tuwien.ac.at/software/guile/guile.html

 "When you get to the point in your project where you need a scripting
language or a configuration file format and reader, the normal course
of things is to say ``I'll just do something clean and simple.'' This
is a good decision. Adding a full programming language is just a
distraction from your project. But simple languages don't seem capable
of staying simple. "

it seems that we are still inventing our syntactically complex
programming language, which ironically is implemented on top of GUILE
Scheme.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen