Re: Explicit default duration?

[David Kastrup]

Dan Eble <dan@lyric.works> writes:

> On Jan 23, 2023, at 18:05, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Dan Eble <dan@lyric.works> writes:
>> 
>>> On Jan 23, 2023, at 10:11, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I am not saying that 0 is the best choice here.  It merely appears to be
>>>> rather cheap.  I thought of * and / but the first renders sequences like
>>>> c4*2 ambiguous and the second would at least become a mess in chord
>>>> mode.
>>> 
>>> Can you clarify how `c4*2` would be ambiguous?  (I was about to
>>> suggest `r*1` for your original example.)
>> 
>> c4*2 could be read as c4 c4 c2 if all of 4 * 2 are interpreted as
>> individual durations.
>
> I see.  I was thinking not of using '*' as a duration, but of omitting
> the duration part of r4*1.
>
>   r4       quarter rest
>   r        rest of default duration
>   r4*2/3   quarter rest compressed to 2/3 of its duration
>   r*2/3    rest of the default duration, compressed to 2/3 of it
>
> So r*1 would use the unscaled default duration.

I'd imagine that syntax to actually be a pretty easy shoo-in.  But its
utility seems limited and I fear that seeing an abundance of *1 inputs
would be more likely to give beginners wrong ideas about what it does
than scaled rests already do.

-- 
David Kastrup