Arguments before or after command?

Cedric Sodhi <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.type-setting.lout
Message-ID <20120902123403.GB11591@slate>
Hello, I just found out about Lout. Firstly, I'm more than amazed by it.
For years I've been using LaTeX, until I found out about GRoff, which
was much better than the former, but as a programmer, I could never
quite get to terms with how inconsistent the syntax itsself seemed to be
(which seems to be a common problem in Typesetting languages which need
to find a balance between being a programming language and being
efficiently typeable). I wish I had known about Lout earlier!

What doesn't quite seem to fit in with Lout being a clean, consistent
language is how arguments are passed to @Commands . By which logic do
commands take arguments { Before } @TheCommand or @TheCommand { And then
the Argument } or even

@TheCommand { And then } { multiple } { Arguments } ?

Sadly, this reminds me a bit of the problems I had with Groff and
especially LaTeX, where sometimes, there appears to be no rule for how
commands are called. Could you shed a bit of light onto that? For
example, why are not all commands constructed according to one syntax
where @TheCommand {Is followed by one object of {possibly subgrouped}
arguments} ?

Thank you advance and congratulations on making such a great software!
Again, I think Lout deserves more publicity than it currently receives
(i.e., practically none?)!

regards,
Cedric
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