Re: [GLISS] non-timed or non-musical events "z" "y"

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 11:23:43PM -0300, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 7:00 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > Take a look at the \tempo command.  Everybody and their dog tells me
>> > that this is just what a musician wants in syntax.  Whenever I do
>> > significant work on the parser, \tempo pitches in with a few dozen
>> > reduce/reduce errors and takes an hour of extra time.
>> 
>> I would argue that this is an indication that the \tempo syntax is a
>> mistake. If making backward incompatible changes is allowed, I would
>> suggest to reconsider and scrap the onerous parts of its syntax.
>
> Of course backwards incompatible changes are allowed until GLISS
> has stabilized a particular bit of language.
>
> But in the case of \tempo, I would hope that adding explicit
> delimiters to the parameters could clear it up.  I think we should
> require explicit delimiters around the argument list for any
> function which has an optional arguments.

\tempo does not have "optional arguments" but rather several quite
different forms of argument lists, and then some rather weird form of
numeric range echoed nowhere else in the syntax.

Using \tempo as an excuse to make syntax everywhere else more cumbersome
is letting it doing even more unwarranted damage.

-- 
David Kastrup