I tried your suggestion of running the examples in CsoundQt, and the console there does give me a more useful error message, which is promising. The output is for example 03A08 is

STARTING FILE
Creating options
Creating orchestra
closing tag
Creating score
rtaudio: PortAudio module enabled ... 
using blocking interface
rtmidi: ALSA Raw MIDI module enabled
error:  Variable '__synthetic_300' used before defined
Line -1
error:  Variable type for __synthetic_300 couldn't be determined.
Parsing failed due to syntax errors

Csound mailing list
Csound@listserv.heanet.ie
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CSOUND
Send bugs reports to
        https://github.com/csound/csound/issues
Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here

Synthetic_300 is an internally generated label in the expansion of if or similar.  You could use -v option to see more but that is rather overkill

⁣Sent from TypeApp ​

On May 3, 2020, 02:33, at 02:33, Pete Goodeve  wrote:
>Hi,
>Something must have gone very wrong when you downloaded
>those CSDs!
>
>On Sun, May 03, 2020 at 01:18:56AM +0100, SUBSCRIBE CSOUND Anonymous
>wrote:
>> I tried your suggestion of running the examples in CsoundQt, and the
>console there does give me a more useful error message, which is
>promising. The output is for example 03A08 is
>> error:  Variable '__synthetic_300' used before defined
>> Line -1
>> error:  Variable type for __synthetic_300 couldn't be determined.
>
>As it happened, I donwloaded that example earlier today to take
>a look, and looking at it now there is *no* '__synthetic_300' anywhere
>in that code!!
>
>Here's what it should look like:
>
>
>
>-nm0
>
>
>ksmps = 32
>
> instr Call
>kNumCall init 1
>kTrig metro 1
>if kTrig == 1 then
>  event "i", "Called", 0, 1, kNumCall
>  kNumCall += 1
>endif
> endin
>
> instr Called
>iNumCall = p4
>kRndVal random 0, 10
>prints "Initialization value of kRnd in call %d = %.3f\n", iNumCall,
>i(kRndVal)
>printks "  New random value of kRnd generated in call %d = %.3f\n", 0,
>iNumCall, kRndVal
>turnoff
> endin
>
>
>
>i "Call" 0 3
>
>
>;example by joachim heintz
>
>------------------------------------------
>
>No variable if that name anywhere...  Try getting the examples
>again, I suggest.
>
>	-- Pete --
>
>Csound mailing list
>Csound@listserv.heanet.ie
>https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CSOUND
>Send bugs reports to
>        https://github.com/csound/csound/issues
>Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here

Csound mailing list
Csound@listserv.heanet.ie
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CSOUND
Send bugs reports to
        https://github.com/csound/csound/issues
Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here