Re: Adding durations (for \after)

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

>       Well, duration-or-music? already exists and it's used by \skip.
    Ah, my bad, I didn't think of looking whether it might already
    exist. I'm surprised that such an either-/or type predicate doesn't
    wreak havoc with the parser.
>       However,
>       this makes for the slight oddity that \skip 4 ... does not set the
>       
>       default duration for the following music, whereas \skip {4} does.
>       
>

Which reminds me: Making the current parser default duration scheme-accessible is a long-standing project of mine. This might creating well-behaved music functions a little easier.

> [...]
>       
>       This allows writing
>       
>       
>         \after 2.+4. \!
>       
>       
>       Something like the edition-engraver might benefit from this as
>       well.
>       
>       
>       Admittedly, I was surprised not to get Bison screaming at me about
>       
>       parser conflicts.
>       
>       
>       I don't know if this is actually useful enough and the right
>       concept
>       
>       to warrant adding. Also, it can hardly be extended to accepting
>       "-"
>       
>       as well as "+", since { 4-16 } is already valid.
>       
>

I think this might actually be quite useful - but maybe the (not easily implemented) "minus" operation might be even better. I had to think of the last piece of Schumann's Dichterliebe op. 48:

Of course, we could just ask Schumann to finally sit down and learn a bit about the basic rules of notation :-), but I'd love to be able to do something like (with \language deutsch)

r8 es2.-8 f2 ges8~
8 as2.-8 8

etc. Obviously, "2.-8" would need to use a different operator symbol, not -, for the reason you gave.

Lukas