Richard Dobson wrote:

> Also , there is the cultural question - why C? Why not Basic, Lisp,
> Pascal, Forth,Occam...

Well, it might be nice to have a music synthesis language where the
syntax of the orchestras and scores is the same as the syntax of the
unit generators themselves.  However, it would probably make more sense
to work with a music language that already has this feature, such as
Cmix or Common Lisp Music, if this is truly important to someone. 
Personally, I enjoy working in Csound most of the time (although for
loops, or while loops, would be nice for implementing denser additive
sounds).

Sean Costello

P.S. Stephen Travis Pope has a relevant article, "Machine Tongues XV:
Three Packages for Software Sound Synthesis," available online at
http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp/publs.html.  Interesting comparison of
Cmix, Csound, and cmusic.  Note that the article was written in 1992 -
obviously, a lot has changed in the meantime (I don't know if cmusic is