Kieren MacMillan <kieren_macmil...@sympatico.ca> writes:
> Hi Harm,
>
>> val = "foo"
>> <<
>> \new Staff \repeat unfold 4 c'4
>> \new Lyrics \lyricmode { \val4 \val2 \val4 }
>> \new Lyrics \lyricmode { \val4 \val4 \val2 }
>>>>
>>
>> Your proposal would make it impossible.
>
> Another good example — thanks. That being said, putting a syllable in
> a variable and then adding durations to it seems to me — as someone
> who engraves a *huge* amount of vocal music, from a wide variety of
> styles, genres, and eras — like a *much* "fringe-i-er" case than the
> number of cases that would benefit from restricting \variableName2 to
> count as a variable name.
>
> Regardless, it doesn’t seem like there’s much enthusiasm to pick up
> the feature request.
It's not like we don't have this discussion pretty much every year.
I can understand newcomers coming up with this proposal: LilyPond is
different to how most languages bar TeX treat numbers. But it does
puzzle me to have the old hands cheer them on.
It's basically a consequence of durations not requiring to be separated
by spaces from note names and consequently not from other letters
either. The = syntax for relative octave checks does not exactly help
squeezing some exceptions in either.
It's a bit dissatisfactory to go the "why don't you believe me" route on
this but there is a reason that the picture of the original "Principles
of Compiler Design" book by Aho&Ullman featured a dragon. "Why don't
you change the compiler yourself" is for one thing a cheap shot, and for
another it is also quite likely to actually lead to superficially
working results of the "well, I saw the parser generator warnings but
the results worked fine" kind where it takes considerable effort to
figure out just what kind of input will get broken by the changes.
--
David Kastrup
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