[Haskell-cafe] Ideas

[Andrew Coppin]

Evan Laforge wrote:
> To get this back to haskell, at the time I wondered if a more natural
> implementation might be possible in haskell, seeing as it was more
> naturally lazy.  Not sure how to implement the behaviours though
> (which were simply macros around a let of *dynamic-something*).  I'm
> sure people have done plenty of signal processing, and there's always
> haskore... but what about a sound generation language like csound or
> clm or nyquist?  It could fit in nicely below haskore.
>   

Indeed, you can write certain DSP algorithms beautifully in Haskell. 
Now, if only it could talk to the audio hardware... (Or just use common 
file formats even.)

> Also, as another reaktor user I agree it would have been so much nicer
> were it simply a real language.  Drawing those boxes and lines and the
> complete lack of abstraction (beyond copy and paste) is a real pain.
> Supercollider is more promising in that way, but less polished of
> course.  It also has that two-level imperative model though where you
> create and modify your signal graph with imperative techniques, then
> run it, rather than your program *being* the signal graph.
>   

Reaktor has abstraction. You can build a gizmo that does something 
useful, call it a macro, and then use it whereever you want.

If you want to build a gizmo that takes a siganl "x" and computes 
"8*x*x*x - 8*x*x + 1" (i.e., the 4th Chebyshev polynomial), you've going 
to have to draw *a lot* of wires! It would be nice if there was some 
feature for quickly building complicated chunks of pure algebra like that.

It would also be nice if there were some way to *programmatically* 
construct the graph... but never mind. (Maybe in Reaktor 6?)