On 9/20/07, Scott Wheeler
If you just want line-in / line-out support, honestly, I could hack that into ChucK in a few minutes this afternoon. The problem isn't so much getting stuff into and out of files, it's doing things with it once you've got it. ChucK doesn't have any significant string manipulation functions. You could use sort of a poor-man's delimiter by using one data field per line and Std.atoi(), perhaps.
Even more interesting from my perspective would be the ability to serialize ordinals (and perhaps later objects) directly to files, but that's a bit more work.
You're right, we need a lot more... This little trick isn't meant as a replacement for anything but what it *could* do is allow one to quickly store something in a way that will survive the end of the VM and being able to get it back in there next time ChucK is started. Previously I couldn't think of a way to do this without also involving other things and terribly ugly and inefficient forms of abuse. Without proper string manipulation this is limited to the only sort of file ChucK can deal with properly being ChucK code, yes.... Still no parsing of strings by groups of letters to feed to the speech synth for example(I'd like that...). But, this *would* allow for permanent storage of -say- patterns of ChucKian sequencers. It's a small thing, I admit, in retrospect I have no idea why I didn't think of it earlier but it also sound like a usefull thing so that's why I shared it. Yours, Kas.