Yes, I ran into other situations where things were unclear to me in similar ways before. I have more of a background in formal logic so I get the overall structures of how things work and how to try to acomplish tasks on a abstract level but I run into trouble with things like this, at least when I want to do it nicely and compactly. A similar thing happened with the way the old keyboard function returned key-presses. That turned out to be very standard and quite usable but that's hard to deal with when you don't know what "standard" is.

Personaly I like it this way; I get to pick up lots of tricks that will likely be usefull in the future and clearly the bits taken from C++ and java work very well but there might also be a lesson here. It'd be good to keep a eye on things like this and try to document these things a bit more explicidly because I'm not the only one for whom ChucK is the first encounter with real object oriented programing (especially on the forum there are people signing up that are just starting to write any code at all) and hopefully there will be many more (considdering the educational goals).

Happy to be a guinea pig,
Kas.