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)?)
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. I can, however, "articulate" one related aspect: The design goal of ChucK is to enable the precise, elegant, and flexible programming of audio, without loss of generality (i.e. completely flexible control rate, precise timing / concurrency), on-the-fly when appropriate. This aim has driven and hopefully will always guide (and modify) the future of ChucK. It is the hope that we, as a group, can figure out what is good towards that aim. As you can tell, ChucK syntax is glued together from syntax and ideas of many existing languages, ranging from C, Java, to Max/MSP, ML, to ChucK itself (some stuff had to be "invented"). An advantage of building the language from the "ground-up" and not necessarily committing the design to any one existing school of language design frees ChucK from obligations and focuses on the design of the language to reason about and control audio - we include what is useful, and leave out the rest. (It also means we have to re-invent some wheels, but that can be good because sometimes a round wheel isn't always we need) 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". 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"];
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. Best, Ge!