Re: Why no numbers allowed in variables?

[David Kastrup]

Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi David,
>
>> The logic does not change every time you cheer
>
> That’s demonstrably false: there have been features which were
> requested years ago which were too difficult to implement at the time,
> but which became easier to implement later because of other code
> improvements (many your own doing).

This one is rather fundamentally a consequence of quite engrained syntax
decisions.  Which may have some roots in the TeX-centric syntax designed
for the MPP (?) music preprocessor for MusicTeX: Han-Wen and Jan
certainly had a strong TeX background.

Once you can no longer write c4 but have to write c 4 instead, it will
be easy to make that change.  Good luck campaigning for that.

The kind of logic that has more of a chance to change is that the like
of \violin.2 (which has no problems being written as \violin.#(+ 1 1) by
the way) is likely to work in more circumstances than it does now.
That's something where gradual improvements are reasonable to be
expected.

-- 
David Kastrup