The design of icsound was pretty much a complete rewrite of all except opcodes and fgen stuff. The design of Csound 5 was much more conservative and incremental, aside the from the parser, which has not yet gone into production.

Merging icsound into Csound 5 might well have been more difficult than what actually happened, which was that the important goals met by icsound were mostly met by Csound 5. 

On the other hand, we would probably be a year or so ahead of the game if icsound had simply been adopted by the "canonical" community as Csound 5.

I think it would be very interesting to review the functionality and architecture of icsound and currently Csound 5, to see if we can pick up some good ideas and/or code now that we have a more stable situation.

I think it's fair to say that prickly personalities played their part in the way things worked out.

I also think it's fair to say that although what happened with the neglect of icsound was unfortunate, having a single active developer community working on a single code base for Csound is good.

Finally, the situation was complicated by the then license of Csound, which was not open source, and this of course also threw the license status of derivative works such as icsound into question.

Regards,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
>From: Victor Lazzarini 
>Sent: Apr 12, 2006 8:54 AM
>To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
>Subject: Re: [Csnd] icsound
>
>It's interesting to hear that the goals were similar. I wonder why it 
>didn't merge with
>canonical to help the development of csound5.
>
>At 13:21 12/04/2006, you wrote:
>>I can't really enumerate the history as such (no longer have the emails 
>>from that period), other than to say it was a huge (and very rapid!) solo 
>>effort by Maurizio Puxeddu around 2001/2 to revamp Csound in a new sort of 
>>OOP way (though all in C still), with goals similar to those of Csound5. I 
>>have an archive of a complete source set dated November 1, 2002 (only 
>>2.4MB zipfile), which I can email to you if you would like it. There is 
>>quite a lot of documentation (some in html form, some in docbook form).
>>
>>
>>Richard Dobson
>
>Victor Lazzarini
>Music Technology Laboratory
>Music Department
>National University of Ireland, Maynooth 
>
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