I see Fons' point, but at the same time, I do find the term rate
misleading, probably because I do program quite a bit.  The issue I
have with rate is exactly Andres' point of there really being only one
rate in Csound.  I can see how rate may be useful when a user first
starts using Csound, but after that I think it hinders more than it
helps to getting a better understanding of coding Csound instruments.
(There is also the term "-sig", as in k-sig, a-sig, w-sig, f-sig, etc.
that is used in Csound.  This clashes sometimes conceptually with
"rate" and "type" as well...)

My preference would be to have a manual page that discuss variables as
a concept, discussing types of variables and their usages.  We could
discuss a kvar or avar as a "variable of type a" or "variable of type
k" and that their usages in musical terms would be "an audio signal"
and a "control signal".  Perhaps a table of "type", "musical use",
"technical detail" would be good here, then using either "kvar" or
"k-type" as a standard for documentation.

As a side note, one thing I reallly appreciated about Music4C when I
looked at that a long while back was the clear separation of init-time
and performance-time as two separate functions.  One ends up doing
this naturally in Csound by doing initialization code at the top of an
instrument and performance code at the bottom. Csound own opcodes
internally have this split into their init functions and performance
functions too. (Ultimately, I think it's an object system with init
function as constructor, but that's probably too geeky! :P )  But
looking at Music4C illuminated a bit some ideas about synthesis
systems that made sense to me.

steven

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Fons Adriaensen <fons@kokkinizita.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 06:52:10PM -0500, Andres Cabrera wrote:
>
>> Rate is misleading as there is actually only a single rate in Csound:
>> control rate. i-rate is not actually a rate, since it is not periodic,
>> but occurs only on instrument initialization, and a-rate is not a rate
>> either, but indicates a vector processed at k-rate.
>
> That's an implementation detail, and irrelevant to a user.
> Conceptually, samples are generated at a-rate. The whole
> system behave 'as if'.
>
> IMHO the term 'rate' comes closest to what is relevant to a
> musical user. 'Type' is software engineering language, and
> I'd guess most Csound users are not software engineers, nor
> should they be expected to be.
>
> Ciao,
>
> --
> FA
>
> Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica
> Parma, Italia
>
> O tu, che porte, correndo si ?
> E guerra e morte !
>
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