Subject: [linux-audio-dev] MIDI and civilized languages
From: est_AT_hyperreal.org
Date: ke loka 13 1999 - 16:34:15 EDT
Christopher Jeris discourseth:
> >> (mention of my secret "Emacs for patches and sequences" project)
> > That sounds interesting. How are you doing it? What will your
> > extension language be? I'm afraid I can't help you with your
> > question. :|
>
> It's a project I've mentioned before, a long time ago - maybe on
> alsa-devel ? I'm a little leery of talking about it because I'm a long
> way from working code and don't want anyone to mind if this doesn't go
> anywhere. Basically I want to take an Objective Caml interpreter
> (http://caml.inria.fr/) and extend it with the ALSA sequencer API, then
> build a set of higher-order functional operations for manipulating synth
> patches and midi sequences.
Very nice..I hope you *do* do this. :)
> Eventually there would be visual editing
> facilities together with an interactive top-level interpreter, that you
> could converse with to express more complicated operations that don't
> reduce to single mouse clicks, like "take this whole bank of patches and
> remap control knob 4 to Overdrive with depth +63 in all of them, moving
> any previous routing to Control Change #nn." (Look Ma! Instant Controlled
> Bleeding!)
Heh..if the mouse is too low bandwidth there's always midi events to
trigger operations. :)
> O'Caml is the fastest implementation of a "civilized" (read: strongly
> typed with higher-order functions and polymorphism) language that I know
> of, which is why I chose it.
Indeed..kind of at the trojan point of Scheme and C++. One nifty
implementation detail is that the byte-code interpreter uses gcc's
computed gotos. Oh..and the winner (or maybe it was just a high
scorer?) of last year's ICFP programming contest was coded in ocaml.
> I am hoping the MIDI protocol is slow enough
> in relation to current processors that I might not even have to
> micromanage the garbage collector too much when it comes time to handle
> sequences.
Sigh..the achilles heel of civilization. If that gc isn't built for
resonably hard real-time, I don't think you're going to get it.
Eric
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