January 2010 - chuck-users - lists.cs.princeton.edu

wishlist for the new year
by Michael Heuer 11 Jan '10

11 Jan '10

Hello ChucKers, Good idea on having the documentation sprint -- it has sparked my interest in ChucK again. Given the time of year I thought I'd throw out my wish list for new ChucK features/enhancements: 1. Import/include mechanism with namespaces The import.ck mechanism in LiCK works ok, but is hard to maintain. All dependencies between classes have to be calculated manually so that all the Machine.adds are in the right order. Having 136 or however many it is classes in LiCK all in the same namespace (no namespace, or the "default package", that is) is a mess. 2. Java-style interface abstract classes, or multiple class inheritance I need either class Foo {} interface Bar {} interface Baz {} class Qux extends Foo implements Bar, Baz or class Foo {} class Bar {} class Baz {} class Qux extends Foo, Bar, Baz 3. Tool for generating ChucK class documentation from its source code (similar to doxygen or javadoc) 4. A way to soft-kill a shred when in an on-the-fly programming session By soft-kill, I mean kill the shread when it is no longer producing non-zero samples, not just kill it immediately. Using e.g. $ chuck - 1 is not pleasant when that shred is still producing sound. 5. Class/type introspection 6. Closures or function pointers 7. Constructors michael

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FLOSS (user editable) manual for ChucK
by Tomasz Kaye's brain 11 Jan '10

11 Jan '10

Hi all. I noticed that there doesn't seem to currently be a user editable version of the ChucK manual online (http://wiki.cs.princeton.edu/index.php/ChucK/Manual this page is the nearest thing i found). While learning things there have been a few cases where I thought small changes to the manual wording would make things clearer (for instance my recent question about how Envelope works). I wondered about moving a copy of the ChucK manual to FLOSS Manuals, where it can be edited by users. http://en.flossmanuals.net/flossmanuals. I used this site in a recent Ardour booksprint I took part in. It's not perfect (sometimes navigation is a little unintuitive), but works well. It uses version history (different versions can be compared too). A user is appointed as a maintainers of a particular manual. Chapters can be edited by anyone with a FLOSS account, but maintainers get to decide when new versions of chapters are 'published' (made visible in the canonical version of the FLOSS manual, the one that guest visitors to the FLOSS manuals site will see) http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals/Maintainers . A few preliminary questions about the idea: @Ge: would you be okay with the current manual being copied to another site, and edited? (i couldn't find license details on the current manual). What do people think of this idea in general? Would people use it? Would it greatly confuse matters to have one more url for ChucK documentation? (any other issues?)

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what is the process for suggesting improvements for the manual?
by Andrew Turley 11 Jan '10

11 Jan '10

I haven't found anything that "officially" describes how to suggest changes to the manual. I've spotted a few things that I think should be fixed, or at least discussed. At least one of them is an actual error, while others are suggestions for how certain sections might be improved. Having said that, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the manual. It looks very useful, and seems to be off to a great start. andy

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making a duration into a string?
by Robert Poor 11 Jan '10

11 Jan '10

How can I cast a duration into a string (e.g. for passing as a string argument)? Consider: // ============= fun void log(string message) { // do something to log the message } 1::second => dur d; log("the duration is " + d); // fails with "cannot perform '+' on object references" log("the duration is " + d.toString()); // fails with "type 'dur' does not have members" // ============= Same question for time objects. TIA. - Rob

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10.6 multiple chucks
by dan trueman 10 Jan '10

10 Jan '10

hey any OSX 10.6 users out there? it seems that it's impossible to run two chucks in separate Terminal windows under 10.6. can anyone confirm or refute this? oy! dan

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chuck crash
by Steve M. Robbins 01 Jan '10

01 Jan '10

Hi, I've discovered chuck only a few days ago so I'm working through tutorials. Today I tried the following code from Graham Coleman's tutorial http://www.iua.upf.es/~gcoleman/chuck/tutorial/tutorial.html //connect a plucked string to the soundcard out StifKarp inst => dac; [0,2,3,1,4,2,6,3,4,4] @=> int mel[]; //sequence data for (0=>int i; ; i++) { //infinite loop std.mtof( 48 + mel[i%mel.cap()] ) => inst.freq; //set the note inst.noteOn( 0.5 ); //play a note at half volume 300::ms => now; //compute audio for 0.3 sec } This crashes chuck (v 1.2.1.3) at the "for" loop line. The code presumably used to work. Has the language changed or is this a simple bug? Thanks, -Steve

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