Joe Neeman <joenee...@gmail.com> writes: > On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 1:00 AM, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote: > > The argument list as such would require delimiting to make this > work independently from advance knowledge about the number of > elements. Which gets us to Scheme syntax. The enthusiasm of > people about this kind of fully delimited syntax is about on par > with the enthusiasm about writing XML files manually. > > Also the type of an argument is not necessarily known without > consulting > the function signature. As a silly example, try > > var = \relative c'-3 > > \void\displayLilyMusic \var > > Try guessing its output before running it. Find an explanation. > Replace \displayLilyMusic with \displayMusic and corroborate your > explanation. > > Isn't this an argument for delimiting the argument list? If you don't > expect anyone to guess where it begins and ends correctly (and I didn't) > , doesn't that mean we should have a more explicit syntax?
I consider it a matter of freedom of expression, and with freedom comes responsibility. C/C++ have a cascade of dozens of operator priorities in spite of having parens. Scheme is fully delimited, and simple. Every program is, unevaluated, a data structure in print form, uniquely determined. For any language for which one can just agglomerate elements into larger expressions without explicit delimiters, you'll get corner cases which are hard to read and a bad idea to write. We don't pick a syntax because of being able to write or not being able to write badly understandable code. We pick it because of being able to write or not being able to write well understandable code. For languages like C++, you get a lot of "the parser must be able to distinguish" pairs that are either function calls or declarations. You don't get that for Scheme. Does that mean that any Scheme program is better readable than a well-written C++ program? No. We pick LilyPond as a language for music descriptions because of being able to write good approximations to what we want. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
