[chuck-users] Some recent thoughts

[Scott Wheeler]

Kassen wrote:
> Fellow ChucKsters,
>
> I was thinking while lying awake last night.... One of the big 
> questions at the moment is writing non-wave data to disc and recalling 
> it. This would be useful for storing the outcome of (random) 
> algorithms, settings tuned by the use of interfaces and any number of 
> other useful and appealing things. I'm certain we'll have this in the 
> future, but what about right now?
>
> One idea I had that I have yet to try in practice is that we could try 
> abusing the call for the OS to execute a terminal command. One of the 
> very old-fashioned commands all three OS's that ChucK runs on is 
> writing a line to a new file or appending a line to a existing file so 
> with some abuse of the new function to form strings we could writem 
> then save a file. If that file would contain a array and a simple 
> command to assign that to a static array in a public class simply 
> executing the file we wrote would give us back the data, asuming we 
> defined some format for this.

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.

-Scott