From: Ge Wang
On Jan 21, 2005, at 8:51 PM, qbxk wrote:
i would like to propose an idea that might very well have good reasons for not doing. i'm putting this out here - phishing...
i want perl and chuck to get married.
(Isn't ChucK a little young to be married (I mean, age difference aside)?)
Definitly, I think so at least. Has it got its bachelor degree from Princeton yeat? No? I didn't think so... ok, definitly too young!
chuck & perl what a beautiful couple. yeah, perlish things like @arrays & %hashes i need to throw at music. and map, grep, dothis if something, and the bajillion perl modules that might create a barrage of audio somehow. good idea/bad idea?
Maybe both good and bad? arrays + hashes are good things - going to appear shortly (see below) - and extensive string handling is coming soon. the bajillion Perl modules are tempting. Perhaps someone with more expertise in Perl (i.e. Alex and many other Perl-enthusiasts who are on this list) can give a better answer.
All tempting things may not be a good advice. Also, there are other alternatives available if a marrige is needed.
I can, however, "articulate" one related aspect:
<SNIP>
There are certainly a great many things we can learn and take from Perl (like it's powerful string/array processing, and the (sometimes ultra-)concise spirit of the language). There are other considerations which make tight integration difficult - for example, Perl is weakly-typed, unlike the ChucK type system, which is useful for things like resolving the ChucK operator, doing arithmetic on time and duration, and makes larger systems much easier to reason about and debug.
In short, ChucK could learn much from Perl - though they are quite different in their "life goals".
Just because there are good languages out there, not all the aspects of them will really make them usefull for real-time processing and real-time programming. You really need to think hard about what features you bring in, since the side-consequences may not be to hard when you do make a misstake and you also want to ensure that it is easy to do the right thing to start with.
As for arrays in the next release:
- there are arrays - arrays are strongly-typed like the rest of ChucK - arrays can be multi-dimensional - all arrays are, by default, both integer-indexed and associative: - more to come...
// basic example { 1, 2, 3, 4 } => int foo[ ]; // assign to element 0 10 => foo[0]; // assign to value mapped from key: "bar", on same array 24 => foo["bar"];
Yeah, that is a step forward... (I looked in the v2 grammar) some time back I advice a friend on his livecoding software where he was going to add arrays. His grammar works a bit different (assignments go left and not right) but strangely enought is the curly brackets left over for vector-constructions. So, he also had the starting point: v = {1,2,3,4}; Now he wanted pointers, but I convinced him that this was a *BAD* idea for a live-coding tool. You don't want to bother debugging pointers in realtime. Anyway, while at it I also proposed a slightly expanded grammar for the vector construction, so that not only single values can be added, but a bunch of values. a = {1,2} b = [3,4] v = {a,5,b} results in v = {1,2,5,3,4} Naturally, you may want to pick values out of a previous vector but not use all of them. a = {2,3,5,7} b = {11,13,17,19} v = {a[3],a[4],b[2],b[3]} It's a bit bulky, so introducing range-selection will make things much better: v = {a[3-4],b[2-3]} If you are curious, I recommended reference counters for him, with no destrutor. It took some time to figure out all the side-consequences, but I was able to close all leaks of references such that the vectors was trown exactly when they where no longer accessable, and thus avoiding a garbage-collector. Again, this makes it suitable for a real-time system.
if good how? run script thru perl interpreter which emits chuck code fed into chuck? line by line for speed?
This is an interesting idea to try, even for the sheer spectacle alone.
Mmmmm..... Cheers, Magnus