"William S. Annis" wrote:
> 
>  >Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 06:44:10 -0700
>  >From: Prent Rodgers 
>  > Can
>  >others on the list discuss how they do the score generation?
> 
>         In Python. (http://www.python.org ... it's free)
> 
>         I agree with the author of Pscore (a Perl score generator)
> that Perl wasn't the best way to go.

That was me. And in case anyone's wondering why they might not want to
get into using perl for csound, it boils down to this:

Will you ever need multi-dimensional data structures? 
(e.g. a list of lists... like for instance a list of event lines, each
of which contains a list of pfield values).

If so, be advised that putting things INTO such structures is not that
hard in Perl, but getting data OUT of the structure is very, very
confusing. Complex data structures are a recent addition to Perl and,
IMHO, it's a pretty ugly hack.

Having gone down that path, I'd advise looking elsewhere. At the moment
Python has my interest -- free, cross-platform, powerful, has lots of
perl-like features (rapid development, garbage collection, regular
expressions, etc) but lacks the hairier messy parts of Perl.

>         I'm curious to know how many other people give up on available
> "composers assistants" and write their own code and why.

I think a lot of people do. Two reasons come to mind:

1) Musical idiosyncrasy: A compositional software tool reveals a lot
about how its author thinks about music. Why spend a few days learning
to think like someone else when you can spend months writing software
that accomodates your own warped thought processes? :)

2) Hackish tendencies: Csound users can be assumed to be people who have
an inclination for fiddling with little tiny details and building tools
out of pretty low-level parts (compared to, say, picking up a guitar or
sitting down at a piano). It's not a far step from writing a csound orc
to writing a score-generating tool; at least, someone who enjoys the
first activity is reasonably likely to enjoy the second.
 

----------------    paul winkler    ------------------
slinkP arts:  music, sound, illustration, design, etc.

zarmzarm@hotmail.com   --or-- slinkp AT ulster DOT net
http://www.ulster.net/~abigoo/