Thankyou for the swift responses.

John: tabdes doesn't appear to output anything usable by scanu. Maybe 
I've set it up incorrectly but it's output looks like this:

1
0.998776
0.995108
0.989005
0.980482
0.969559
0.956264
0.940629
0.922691
0.902496
0.880092
0.855535
0.828883
0.800204
etc...

I was hoping for a string of ones and zeroes.

Steven: thankyou for blue. This obsession with generating tables started 
(some weeks ago now) when I tried to load the spiral-8, 16, 128, 2, 
1over2 table in the blue matrix editor. It wasn't working in the .csd 
from the toot and I wanted to have a look at it and figure out was was 
going wrong. The matrix editor couldn't load it, so I had a look at the 
text file and realised that instead of the binary string it was a string 
of numbers:

123
17
71
97
4
110
48
30
123
10
etc...

Looking at the man page for xscanu it seems to be an incomplete 
imlementation of the new matrix form. Working under the assumption that 
it was supposed to be a Cornu spiral, I started messing around with 
octave and scipy, which I will continue to do although my ignorance is a 
source of immense frustration at this point.  I'm hoping that I'll be 
able to get things working using octave and the external soundobject in 
blue. Octave prints to stdout so it shouldn't be too difficult, problem 
is translating a function into the requisite zeroes and ones. Any 
pointers on where to start with a python script would be great.

Thanks,

Jonathan.