Offhand, I'd have to mention that left to right is not by any means a characteristic of all languages ... only Western ones. I think the fact that it has syntax is more linguistically significant, than the fact that its written form appears different than a typical language. If C is a "language" than I'd argue that PD is also one... The problem, if anything, is that C, or PD, have TOO MUCH structure and syntax.
Human language exists in a state of indeterminacy and ambiguity, whereas computer languages are too precise.
~David
No, it's got syntax, at many levels, functionally, because it must have to work. But not *that* syntax, "that" being its representation, as a fixed written language with linewise ordering in a file. In Pd GUI your syntax is spacially all over the place. That's nice, it changes your thinking because you can put down the essential operators as they come to mind and then plumb them up later, whereas with a written language is forming statements like sentances starting at the left side and finishing on the right. It's a different kettle of badgers completely. And it's got a syntax in the sense of strictness, the way blocks are evaluated, so if you don't know and obey the rules it won't work just like any other language.
or computational causality either.
How can Pd execute a patch then?
I don't see a lack of causality.
Me neither, unless Millers cracked some quantum jiggerypokery without saying. I mean expression of it. Not exactly elegant in Pd is it? There's always good old [until], "only a matter of time [until] you're gonna have to reboot".
If I remember right a tracker file stores the samples as well as the timing sequences so they'd have to be read into arrays. (?)
Conceptually you need a 1-D array for the order, a 3-D array of structs for the patterns (pattern#,row,channel), and one array per sample. I say conceptually because the actual layout could be different if it makes things any easier.
For Impulse Tracker files, the 3-D array is to be replaced by a sequence of 2-D arrays because each pattern may have a different number of rows; and also there's the concept of instrument which inserts itself between the concepts of pattern and sample.
That's quite a powerful structure, and the instruments layer makes sense for a polyphonic audio sequencer that wants to deal with multi playbacks from the same table. It would be really interesting to see what ways people came up with for representing that data with a way to read and write MOD files to and from a generaly open ended datastructure sequencer like Franks.
a.
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