Hans

There is a package Haskell package Haskore <http://haskell.org/haskore/> for doing MIDI that perhaps can give some ideas of the usability of lambda-calculus in music. Haskell though, because of its overall laziness, needs to use monads to express typing of imperative structures. Could be a bother in music.

One of the questions is that a Lambda operator is typically used in languages that are very different from ChucK and combined with very different constructs. I think that in a strongly typed language it might be much less useful and there are things that are more or less equivalent. I'm still interested in ideas like operator overloading, particularly of the ChucK operator. I also think functors might be nice ideas.

We are talking about syntactic sugar here. I do think sugar can make sense and it could work as a double edged sword. We could for example attempt to create a syntax for audio rate modulation that would be more predictable in structure than sporked shreds which we might also try to use behind the scenes to optimise computation; that to me would make loads of sense and it would serve two needs that I think are clearly held without excessively complicating syntax.

I'd like to see a example of what you or Tom (or anyone else for that matter) would imagine a Lambda operator would look like in ChucK or what it would solve. I suspect we could do most of that sort of thing in other ways as well and I fear trouble could well follow. When I started writing my last email to this list it seemed to me like anonymous functions that would write to parameters at audio rate seemed like a fairly innocent thing, I think it's now clear that those aren't as innocent (I went "oops" myself).

Yours,
Kas.