[LAD] Prototyping algorithms and ideas

[Albert Graef]

Kjetil S. Matheussen wrote:
> If you _really_ like functional programming and aren't
> afraid to learn a really different syntax, faust might probably
> be a very good alternative. I don't think you'll get the kind of tight
> interactive development environment with it as the other systems
> though. ie. you have to write code, compile up, run test, etc.,
> while in the other systems, you can just write code and test directly.

That's true, I'm the first one to admit that as I already use the
Faust/Pd combination in courses, and the students complain about this
all the time. ;-) We definitely need to work on that. This might need
some cooperation from Pd (right now, Pd doesn't seem to like reloading
externals on the fly, at least I haven't figured that out yet).

The Pd/Q interface works much better in that respect since it already
allows hot-swapping the running Q script, and you can trigger that,
e.g., from Emacs. A similar trick could be done with Faust plugins, too,
by making a generic Faust external which just acts as a container, and
loads the real plugin on its own behalf.

CLAM is supposed to offer nice Faust integration (via LADSPA) already,
but I haven't tried it yet. I'm looking forward to use that combination
in one of my next audio programming courses, though.

CLM and snd are also nice for prototyping purposes, of course, as are
all the others mentioned in this thread. But for me the special thing
about Faust is that it's purely functional to boot and has a formal
semantics. Your programs read like mathematical specifications, and
that's what they are. I won't even mention the expression syntax, as I
don't want to invite the 5625342th parens-versus-infix flamefest. Oops,
now I did it. :)

Faust isn't perfect either. For one thing, it still lacks multirate
processing. And my pet peeve: the lack of a unary minus operator. ;-)

What an interesting thread. Keep it going. :)

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr.Graef at t-online.de, ag at muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag