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Just to get the history a bit more accurate, Csound actually comes to us
via Barry Vercoe's Music-360 which was run on IBM mainframes (such as the
IBM-360, of course), which became Music-11 and then Csound. An interesting
feature of Music-360 for it's time was the ease with which one could add
ones own unit generators (written in FORTRAN) to use in Music-360
intruments. I found myself using Music-360 in Italy in the early 80's
after having used Music-11 in Brooklyn and wanted to be able to use
lpread/lpreson. I was able to add my own FORTRAN versions of this to
Music-360. And it wasn't necessary to recompile all of Music-360 before
running a job in order make subroutine calls on your own units. In
Music-11 one could't really add unit generators like that. In Csound, of
course, we can all add our own code.
Richard Karpen
On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Charles Starrett wrote:
> ### At 11:46 PM -0800 2/23/99, Dr J.Stevenson's research assistant wrote:
> >Richard Dobson wrote:
> >
> >> Also , there is the cultural question - why C? Why not Basic, Lisp,
> >> Pascal, Forth,Occam...
> > I haven't yet seen the obvious ( semmantical ) reason yet!!
> >its called CSound not (B)ASICsound (L)ispsound,... :)
>
> The cultural answer is:
> CSound is a port of Music 11 from PDP-11 assembly into the more-portable C
> to allow it (Music 11) to be run on many different platforms. The syntax
> did not change significantly if at all... Thus the "C" in "CSound" refers
> to the programing language of the source that the binaries are compiled
> from, not the "parentage" of the .orc/.sco syntax.
>
> --
> /----Charles D. Starrett-----\ "I do not feel that
> | / | ____ | | ____ | | my research suffered unduly
> | /\ | |-- |-| ___| | | from the fact that I enjoyed it."
> | |___ |____| | |_____| | *Daniel Miller,
> \--starrett@fas.harvard.edu--/ Modernity--an Ethnographic Approach
>
>
> |