Okay... affine
spaces. I'm going to have to wikipedia that one, i'm
afraid
(high school math ain't doin' it for me here ;-) I
understand
the analogy of vectors and point, though--I think that lends
some
credence to the idea that Chuck is already on the right path as
far
how the dur and time types work.
I see the analogy and I think it has a lot of merit.
I'm also, at
the same time, sticking to my older point that ChucK is already muddying the
waters and is in fact getting quite a bit of use from that, for example "now -
(now % T) => now;", I find that line very beautiful, extremely useful and
in direct opposition to looking at time objects are pure references to
instances.
I
still have a few questions. The first is for
Kassen: Why do you
want to know the VM start time?
To quote Nick Cave; "I can't see for the smoke so I poke around, I
poke around"(etc)
At some moment I just tried it as the units are the
same, it didn't work so I tried some more related stuff.
I want to
learn so I'm asking questions. ChucK is a great tool to put some bangin' beats
on the proverbial floor and it's a nice experiment in syntax. I like both
aspects a lot. At the core of ChucK's syntax is time and timing so any
questions and -possible- incoherency's in working with those are quite
interesting.
I can find the birth of the VM and half a minuted after I
found out how to I shared this with the list so now we all can, but I think
some questions remain. I don't know about you but so far I have used "time" as
a data type only rarely and I didn't know that much about it, I think we all
know a bit more now. In a way there is a certain philosophical beauty to only
being able to define time in relation to the "now" but as this can lead to
some decidedly odd expressions I wonder if that's intentional and proper.
As for actual use, I could imagine that referring to absolute
moments in time could become useful when writing a score, especially with some
sort of sorting, Csound style. Maybe there are other better uses, maybe it's
all quite academic? I'm already enthusiastic there are people that have a
position on this too.
I'm
just thinking out loud...
So was and am I. It's the ultimate in open-source!
"thinking out loud" strikes me as a excelent slogan for a musical
programing language.
Yours,
Kas.