Re: [GLISS] differentiating pre/post/neutral commands

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> So far the discussion has gone according to my predictions.
> There's panic (and IMO overraction) from people who actually know
> the parser, which does not encourage open discussion of ideas.
> Why not hold the preliminary discussions on a separate list (to
> which parser experts are encouraged *not* to read), then only
> bring a proposal to -devel when it's ready?
>
> I mean, what possible downsides are there to this?

Syntax discussions will not likely lead anywhere sensible without
involving people actually having worked with parsers.  Many proposals
can be "shot down" with "and what interpretation should we assign to x?"
kind of questions rather than "I am the master of the parser, and you
better will believe me that I'll never have x while I live".  Now a
question like "and what interpretation should we assign to x?" or an
"this would also imply y, and are you comfortable with that?" is one of
logic more than of parser design, but of course they are easier to come
up with if you have been exposed to tripping over them a lot.

Shooting bad ideas down fast means that one can cover more ground in the
same amount of time before people run out of steam.

> It will be made abundantly clear to those on the
> lilypond-fluffy-syntax-discuss list that their ideas will not become
> code unless there's a good way for that to happen, and that nobody
> (especially not David) is responsible for turning them into code, and
> that technical concerns will trump any amount of "niceness" in
> examples, and any other disclaimers you want to add.

I am afraid that this might rather demotivate people to work on
proposals.  If they take a week to write something up and it gets shot
down basically in a minute, that's not exactly going to make them plunge
with renewed vigor into the next week of writing up a proposal.

-- 
David Kastrup