Re: Why no numbers allowed in variables?

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi David,

> It's easy to tell the developers "make it so".  But before you can tell
> a compiler to "make it so", you need to have a logically coherent
> proposal.

I wasn’t trying to tell anybody to "make it so" — I was just avoiding offering 
my limited (and almost certainly flawed) understanding of Lily’s underpinnings 
when others (such as yourself) might give a detailed, useful, and accurate 
answer instead.

However, I’m always happy to have a discussion towards a logically coherent 
proposal that would allow a compiler to "make it so" for some given 
feature/request such as this one.

So here are my first offerings:

> Is c4 a note or a variable name?

If I saw

   c4 = something

then I would think it’s a variable. If I saw

  c4 something

(i.e., without an assignment operator) I would think it’s a note. Is that a 
rule that can be made logically coherent for a compiler?

>  Is \part2 the variable "part" followed
> by a half note, or is it the variable "part2"?

If I were developing Lilypond code, I simply wouldn’t allow a note value to be 
post-fixed to a variable, so

   \part2

would have only one interpretation (i.e., as the variable "part2"). But that’s 
only because I can’t see a good use case for the alternative. Can anyone 
suggest a reason to allow

   part = { c4 8 8 }
   \part2

where the latter is intended to do something… um… coherent?

Cheers,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden