Re: new and context

[David Kastrup]

Keith OHara <address@hidden> writes:

> LilyPond's grammar, however, is complex due to history and its complex
> job.  It is twice the length of that for C or Pascal, and growing.  I
> have tried to use the printed grammar to understand LilyPond, but
> never succeeded.

Well, in the last two years, many things have been reimplemented as
music functions, and music functions have become very generic, using
lexical tie-ins here and for other purposes.  The number of reserved
words recognized specifically in the grammar has dropped quite a bit.
So a lot of information about LilyPond constructs is no longer in the
grammar, and the grammar contains a lot of "noise" that has no
recognizable relation to the LilyPond language as it is being used.

This means that the printed grammar has lost much of its utility as a
resource for understanding LilyPond's operation.  Instead, its purpose
is mostly figuring out the whereabouts of parser problems.  And that is,
indeed, not useful for the average user.

-- 
David Kastrup