September 2008 - chuck-users - lists.cs.princeton.edu

emacs, and other editors for chuck
by Stephen Sinclair 09 Sep '08

09 Sep '08

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Kassen <signal.automatique(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Stephen Sinclair; > >> I don't use it (emacs ftw!) > > Would you have the time to share some of your thoughts on the advantages of > emacs for ChucKing? I looked at it but it's quite a daunting editor and I'd > like to know a bit about the potential gains before investing time in it. Hm, let's see. _mainly_ I use emacs because i'm used to it. I use it for coding, and my fingers know the shortcuts, and it just works for me. I've tried to get used to vim, for example, and just can't seem to do it. This goes for any editor, of course: use what you know, and what you like. I'm not on any mission to make people use specific software, I can't only make recommendations. However, there are some virtues, I think that deserve mention. (Some of these will of course be available in other programs.) One, is that emacs has "windows". You can drop a shell into one window, an editor into another, and a status window into a third. You can split the screen in any desireable way. Two, is that I have F6 configured for "compile", which gives me a one-liner shell command, and F7 for "recompile", which just repeats whatever the last compile command was. This is insanely useful for chucking, because you can hit F6 and tell chuck to load your script, and then take note of which shred ID it got, and use the '=' command to replace it the next time. Then just edit and keep hitting F7. On top of that, emacs has really good search & replace and regexp support. (I use the former more than the latter.) Which I have configured to Ctrl-A on my keyboard so that's a really fast thing to do. Then I can switch between files by hitting Ctrl-B and typing the first few letters of the file name and then Tab (if i've loaded it already) or load or create a new file with Ctrl-F. The filename completion rocks. Lastly, it's completely programmable with lisp. So if I wanted I could probably make it way more intelligently communicate with ChucK, interpreting its error messages among other things. But I don't have the patience for that. :) One thing that I sorely miss is the ability to automatically track which shred IDs get assigned to which files, for when I want to remove or replace a shred. However I think this is also partly the fault of ChucK which can't be bothered to tell me this information in a useful way, since it doesn't differentiate between files and sporks. But I'd love to be able to remove or replace a shred by *name* instead of by some number that I have to look way back in the buffer to find. (But of course Ctrl-S-S "search" is pretty quick for this.) All in all I don't have to take my hand off the keyboard, which is particularly nice. As for it being a daunting editor, I really only use a handful of commands, though of course it's capable of much more. > >> >> but I just tried to compile it quickly and >> it failed, so I can't help directly. > > Hmmm. I found the Mini quite easy to compile, at least since there is a > clear list of all that you need for it, on top of ChucK's dependencies. Yeah I don't know why it didn't work. But I haven't taken the time to figure it out. Probably something small. > I just wish it would have a more intelligent "replace" function for shreds > then always replacing the last one that was run. It's nice and simple, I > like that. There are hotkeys for running code though not enough for editing > it. emacs will solve all of those issues, I'm sure but that would go at the > expense of the simplicity? I'd love to program some emacs lisp, or some other mechanism, to track which shreds have been loaded. Something that would give super-quick keyboard access to remove or replace specific shreds. Perhaps Tab completion would be good for this. By the way, with all this talk about emacs, I should really specify, honestly, that I really only have a very short beard. And no, I don't wear sandles. ;-) cheers, Steve

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paper trail
by Kassen 09 Sep '08

09 Sep '08

Fellow ChucKists, Does anybody know what my options are in printing (to paper, the old-fashioned way) from the Mini under (Ubuntu) Linux? Ideally I'd like to periodically or on command print edit buffers to paper as text as part of a performance. Is this possible at all? Yours, Kas.

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Re: [chuck-users] Reconnecting Ugens (was; determining type)
by Tiemen Meerman 07 Sep '08

07 Sep '08

Kassen, (Long time no speak, btw!) > What if we'd wish-list two new member functions for UGen's, similar to the new "UGen.isConnectedTo( Ugen )"? I'm imagining "isConnectedTo()" and ".connectsTo()", both of which would return a array of type Ugen (that could obviously be of length 0). Fully agree! Introspection of this kind is a must in my opinion! The possibilities would be endless and I don't see why the scope should be limited - access to the entire graph from anywhere should be possible and makes for a much simpler implementation. I am uncertain whether the instanceof operator/function was ever implemented, but that would be equally essential. While wish-listing (and slightly related) a cool feature would be a way of tagging UGens with a arbitrary string. This would give us a way of providing a unique AND meaningful identifier to a UGen. Useful while traversing complicated graphs. > I am starting to think that this kind of wrapping, for what sounds like it could also be seen as a very general and atomic operation, is a bit much; to get the extra feature of reconfiguring the UGen graph we'd have to sacrifice the ChucK operator as it applies to UGen's. I like the ChucK operator, too, but wish it was overloadable by the user - this would allow us a hook to do a lot of things! (I will not even try to list them ;) Have been away from my computer for too long, and wish ChucK ran on BlackBerries! -T

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Re: [chuck-users] Reconnecting Ugens (was; determining type)
by Kassen 07 Sep '08

07 Sep '08

Tiemen; > That sounds like the correct behaviour, as you only change the memory > address 'patchpoint' is pointing to. The actual graph will know nothing of > this event. > Ok. Learned another thing. I suppose I took the word "assignment" too literally. Thanks! > > This method adds yet another wrapper around the UGens, but might be worth > it for the flexibility it provides. > Yes, could be interesting and worthwhile for specific applications like perhaps a configurable multi FX. I am starting to think that this kind of wrapping, for what sounds like it could also be seen as a very general and atomic operation, is a bit much; to get the extra feature of reconfiguring the UGen graph we'd have to sacrifice the ChucK operator as it applies to UGen's. What if we'd wish-list two new member functions for UGen's, similar to the new "UGen.isConnectedTo( Ugen )"? I'm imagining "isConnectedTo()" and ".connectsTo()", both of which would return a array of type Ugen (that could obviously be of length 0). This would enable us to write something like; ========================================= fun void replace (UGen target, UGen replacement) { while(target.isConnectedTo().cap() ) { target.isConnectedTo()[0] => replacement; target.isConnectedTo()[0] =< target; } while (target.connectsTo().cap() { replacement => target.connectsTo()[0]; target =< target.connectsTo()[0]; } } ======================== To me this sounds more general then the new "UGen.isConnectedTo( Ugen )" function from the latest version which could be re-written in terms of my modest proposal while the reverse isn't true. Am I making sense here? It's not that I don't see the use of wrapping Ugens to gain some domain specific functionality and it's great that we can, but reconfiguring the UGen graph sounds to me like a very general type of functionality that may be desirable as a part of the language. There are, of course, namespace issues here. Using these and starting from the DAC we could map the complete (active) UGen Graph while this should be limited to the UGens that are reachable from the current namespace. I'm not sure how feasible this is right now; clearly all of the knowledge we need is there in the system but that need not mean it's easily reachable, seeing as how the UGen graph is relatively independent from the code. Apologies for jumping from topic to topic like that; little sleep meant a bit of a heightened associativity for me. :¬) Yours, Kas.

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Re: [chuck-users] determining the type of an Object in code
by Tiemen Meerman 07 Sep '08

07 Sep '08

Hmmm, after testing I found that sadly the following will run (without errors) but won't "fly"; =============== SawOsc s => UGen patchpoint => dac; second => now; new LPF @=> patchpoint; second => now; ======================== It seems that asignment to a UGen doesn't affect the Ugen-graph? That sounds like the correct behaviour, as you only change the memory address 'patchpoint' is pointing to. The actual graph will know nothing of this event. I was thinking of a class that achieves what you are aiming for: UGenRepatch - usage would look like: UGenRepatch repatch; repatch.ugen(LPF lpf); repatch.addIn(SawOsc osc); repatch.addOut(dac); To setup the basic graph. After this you could repatch by saying: repatch.ugen(HPF hpf); Internally it would then unchuck the old LPF and place the HPF in the middle. Obviously you could also write functions to remove/replace Ins or Outs from the central UGen. This method adds yet another wrapper around the UGens, but might be worth it for the flexibility it provides. -Tiemen

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Audicle updating and shredID tracking
by Kassen 04 Sep '08

04 Sep '08

Dear list, Because I quite like some of the new features (especially the array appending) and quite like the Mini I tried ripping out the "chuck" bit of the Mini source, putting in the new version and compiling (Ubuntu, latest long term support version, up to date, I could look up details if needed). As far as I could see this works perfectly (so far...), no need at all to be burdened by any knowledge of C. Still, my current series of experiments could benefit a great deal from linking editor windows to shred ID's so I tried the same with the Audicle and got some errors that made it quite clear I'd need to know C/C++ in some detail to deal with them. So, first of all; the adventurous might like to try their hand at this and have a updated Mini (the "about" dialogue even reports the correct ChucK version, nice). Secondly, should the Audicle take such abuse? I feel this would be quite nice but there might be hard questions? Would it be a idea to use something like colour coding of window-headers (or some similar graphical element) to link editor buffers to running shreds in the Mini? I think that would be very nice as a help in livecoding. Like most people I can keep track of about 7 or so things at a time and the link between editor buffers and shred ID's that was steablished 15 minutes ago tends to be one of the things that gets lost.... Yours, Kas.

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Chuck Concurrency Best Practices
by mike clemow 02 Sep '08

02 Sep '08

Hi everyone, So, I've been struggling to find a method to leverage the concurrency model in Chuck and I keep running up against the same issue: my guts tell me to do things that I can't do because of fact that child processes are alive only as long as the parent and the fact that objects are only passed by reference. Let me unpack this for you. I'm building a granular synthesis class library for Chuck. Most everything is being cast as one of two types of objects: 1) Forkable - a process that takes parameters and can be run or sporked 2) Forker - an object that knows how run a process and will fork it out for you. In order to get over the fact that functions are not (yet) datatypes in Chuck which can be passed to other functions, I'm basically following the example that Kassen, Mike, et al. were discussing in this forum topic: http://electro-music.com/forum/viewtopic.php?highlight=functor&t=23546 My problems always seem to rise from the fact that every Forker (whose job it is to fork a process) also has to be aware of how long that process is going to take or else run the risk of dying before it's child has completed. This leads to infinite passing of responsibility for time and every Forker seems to also need to be a Forkable and have it's own Forker, et cetera ad inifinitum. At higher and higher levels of abstraction, finding the duration of a process BEFORE it runs and figuring out how to handle it, is requiring more and more analysis and feels... for lack of a better word, "wrong" to me. This is compounded by the fact that the objects I'm passing into these functions (methods of other objects) can only be passed by reference and it's increasingly difficult to set-and-forget these processes, since they constantly reference other global objects. The passing by reference is fine, but I find myself wishing I had the choice to make a copy. Now, it's entirely probable that I just haven't caught on yet and am going about this process in a completely backward way. Does anyone here run into similar issues and (even better) have good methods of avoiding them? One idea I have considered is to make a Forker a looping process that receives Events as input, rather than an object with methods. As this would require a(nother) complete re-write, I'm stalling. ;-) So, how do you manage your concurrent processes in Chuck? Cheers, Michael PS: Love dynamic Arrays! Can't wait for those SC/Smalltalk-like array methods! -- http://semiotech.org/wp-prod/ http://semiotech.org/michael

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