[chuck-users] Some recent thoughts

[Stephen Sinclair]

> 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.

Hello self-modifying code... ;-)


> 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.


I think a really nice use of serializable objects would be to take
care of a complaint in that previous thread about live coding...
you've written a routine to randomly generate a nice melody (based on
a severely complicated algorithm of course), but when you decide to
modify something, oops you've lost it because you have to restart.

So a nice feature might be to allow saving an object to a file.  Next
time around, the code could attempt to load the object from disk.  If
successful, go nuts with it, but on failure, generate a random melody
and save the object to disk...

(Of course this brings up all sorts of real-time issues.  I guess
saving & loading would have to be done asynchronously somehow, but I
think a bit of buffering could take care of that.)


Steve