Re: preliminary GLISS discussions

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Joe Neeman <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > With the current syntax, this is certainly true. But if a music
>> > function's arguments were delimited syntactically somehow then we
>> > could parse without interpreting any music functions, right?
>>
>> The argument list as such would require delimiting to make this work
>> independently from advance knowledge about the number of elements.
>> Which gets us to Scheme syntax.  The enthusiasm of people about this
>> kind of fully delimited syntax is about on par with the enthusiasm about
>> writing XML files manually.
>>
>> Also the type of an argument is not necessarily known without consulting
>> the function signature.  As a silly example, try
>>
>> var = \relative c'-3
>>
>> \void\displayLilyMusic \var
>>
>> Try guessing its output before running it.  Find an explanation.
>> Replace \displayLilyMusic with \displayMusic and corroborate your
>> explanation.
>
> Isn't this an argument for delimiting the argument list?

It is. The disadvantage is that it breaks all existing files.

>  If you don't expect
> anyone to guess where it begins and ends correctly (and I didn't), doesn't
> that mean we should have a more explicit syntax?


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