On 03/09/12 14:18, David Kastrup wrote:
I don't have a good answer here, and I am not particularly happy with
suggesting that the work I end up doing will not likely be shaped much
by committee or community decisions but rather mostly by my own
conscience and programmer instincts.  Which, in turn, are shaped by the
perceived needs of the community.

Would it be better in this respect if, instead of proposing syntax changes (which are easily problematic if done without sufficient knowledge of how the parser and lexer work), we collaborated on defining the _problem_ with sufficient rigour? That is, identifying what the syntax needs to achieve and how the current syntax fails.

In this case, the problem might include that the syntax needs an unambiguous way to indicate whether a command applies to a preceding or subsequent note or entity; an unambiguous way to group together entities (including commands) so that other commands can be applied to them collectively; a way to indicate direction where this matters; and so on. I'm deliberately _not_ being rigorous at this point, but I think you get the idea.

Then, once the problem _is_ rigorously defined and agreed upon, you and the others who understand the technical issues could propose a solution, and we could provide feedback in terms of usability, whether it actually _does_ solve the problem we face and so on, and so evolve towards a solution.

_______________________________________________
lilypond-devel mailing list
lilypond-devel@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel

Reply via email to