Hello, After some experiments of my own, and following the tutorial at ISMIR'08, I'd like to see if I can contribute something to ChucK. Main thing that I'd like to see added is support for strings. Not much, but in such a way that a fairly common thing like a parser could be written. I work with MusicXML myself, and I'd love to be able to parse a music score in ChucK. Outputting and concatenating is a good beginning, but what I'd like to see is e.g. an [] operator to select characters in a string (treating it as an array), eventually augmented with some basic functionality like the things that can be found in the C++ STL or the Java standard library. Before I dive blindly into the code and hacking things together, I'd like to open this up for discussion first: - a lot of C++ STL implementations are infamous for not being threadsafe. Shredsafeness seems to me however a first requirement. True or false? If anyone has some good pointers or links on this issue, please let me know! - Any major programming language today has to be able to process Unicode strings. This also brings up the problem of different encodings, etc... Perhaps it's a good idea to model strings after Java, and have a look at how Java VM's do it? - After giving it some thought I'd like to avoid introducing a character datatype, and instead regard a character as a string with length 1. There's already types enough in this world. But is this feasible, or do I miss something which would require a character type? - Is it perhaps easier to integrate a string library from another open source project instead of writing an own library? Pointers and links very welcome! - Java and C++ have very different ways of handling strings. In Java all strings are managed in a pool in the VM and only references to them are used at runtime, while in C++ you can endlessly screw around with pointers to char arrays. Which paradigm is preferable in ChucK? (personally, I tend to say Java, but then again, I truly hate the difference between the == and .equals() operators messing with my mind) I don't have much spare time so I'm not going to promise that I'm even going to start working on this - if the task at hand would eventually seem to be too big, It's perhaps better for a grad student's project... All the best from Belgium, Joachim Ganseman PhD student @ Visionlab University of Antwerp Belgium