The fact that slurs and grouping must be appended after the note hasn't always been so. I have been a user since its first versions, and at the beginning you wo

The fact that slurs and grouping must be appended after the note hasn't always been so. I have been a user since its first versions, and at the beginning you would write a legato scale like this: (c d e f g a b c) which indeed looks more natural because resembles the way parentheses are used in mathematics and programming. If I remember correctly, the change happened ~20 years ago because it made the notation more consistent: everything related to the note happens after the note name (durations, staccato, marcato, slurs, etc.). I remember that it took me several months to get acquainted with the new syntax.