Dear crazy csounders,

Sorry I caused such a triple stream of consciousness (no in fact
I am quite happy with it). Then I had to go and could not connect
to the internet to participate to the debate (the parser for orc files
is *GOING ALONG* though! Just removed 77 reduce/reduce conflicts!
(had to brush my yacc!) and the lexer is ready - yes I know that is easy).

Can we please keep these two topics separate (they really are):

1) the parser - let's do *one thing at a time*: I am not writing a csound
   parser to *extend* csound; I am writing it because I feel that maybe
   we could all profit from it (save the ones that think that it is
   too complicated - just joking ;-) for many reasons: we could build
   other applications on top of it, for example; also, we could, in
   the future try to replace the existing one - if this is felt necessary;
   *THEN*, and only as a third option, we could timidly think of some
   extensions. I agree with Richard Dobson and others that the ones
   Riccardo (with two 'c') proposes are a little cosmetic, and that maybe
   we should go for arrays or things like that (and somebody said don't
   touch the orc files: why, would'nt you like to embed strings and
   things like that in there?) before;

2) dynamic linking: the purpose I meant was exactely NOT to create
   a monster: a small application which would load the library it
   needed at run-time; I would'nt go very far to look on how to do
   that: just have an ASCII config file somewhere in 'the right place'
   which has the connection opcode-library; during parsing, csound
   builds a linked lists of NULL terminated OENTRY table out of all
   the libraries it needs; each library has an OENTRY table which it
   links when it dlopen()s it, basta. Simple means portable, and it
   also means that it even has some chance to work...

I am really happy that the FAQ topic came out too: can we add to
the FAQ: why is divz documented since version 0 but never implemented?
(I never knew that one); a HOWTO would be also another nice thing
to do: anyone?

Nicola
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicola Bernardini
E-mail: nicb@axnet.it
 
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe
the picture.  Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described
with pictures.