Re: spacer rest *

[Gianmaria Lari]

On 1 May 2018 at 05:32, David Wright <address@hidden> wrote:

On Tue 01 May 2018 at 00:15:24 (+0200), David Kastrup wrote:
> David Wright <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > AFAICT the important exception that was introduced with naked
> > durations was that c 4 notates a single note whereas c4 4 notates two.
>
> There was no "exception" introduced.  c 4 always indicated a single note
> and c4 4 previously was invalid input.

There's no guarantee that a new user, or a user who has only set eyes
on notation like c4, will make the correct interpretation of, say,
c 4 4 4 when they first encounter it. Without looking it up, there's
no way of knowing whether LP would treat it as three notes or four.

So if a new user thinks that a naked duration always specifies a note
they're likely to see the first duration in c 4 4 4 as an exception.
The ambiguity didn't arise before as there was no possibility of
seeing such a string (without throwing an error).

Of course it wouldn't look like an exception to you or anyone who's
already familiar enough with LP syntax.

Absolutely!!!!! And the problem is not really when "you see". It's when "you write". A learnear like me, after discovering the syntax "c4 4 4" will use with no problem like this:

d4 c 4 4

discovering that it engraves

d4 c4 c4

But starting from the moment that you say that  pitches and durations can be separated by a space I don't see any way to prevent this thing. But does human would ever separate pitch from duration and write "c 4 d 4 e 8"? If not, maybe we could output some sort of warning when the code contains spaces between pitch and duration?

 

But the OP's doubts concerned
learners and that's why my views diverge from theirs: I would prefer
a decision (concerning durations applying only to pitches) based on
power users rather than learners.

Yes, I found this a perfectly reasonable choice! But I have no idea if it is correct :)

g.