[CM] Slime vs Grace (was: Arno in Grace?)

Heinrich Taube taube at illinois.edu
Thu Dec 29 09:09:55 PST 2011


On Dec 29, 2011, at 9:07 AM, Torsten Anders wrote:

> Dear Ralf Mattes,
>
> On 29 Dec 2011, at 11:52, rm at tuxteam.de wrote:
>> To give up all these nice libraries and be locked into a stadalone  
>> scheme seems a high price to pay (and, most important for me: hving  
>> to give up decades uf muscular memory (emacs as an editor) is the  
>> highest price I'd have to pay with Grace).


sheesh. I too have 30+ years of emacs; I still use it every day. But  
for composition I dont feel Grace is a "high price to pay" for leaving  
Emacs/Slime/CommonLisp.

Grace's editor does have a sticky Emacs mode which covers about 90% of  
the common Emacs commands  including the hard stuff like moving  
forward and backward by expressions(eg c-m-f) , evaluations services,  
syntax highliting, syntactic indentation, and  i add/fix whatever  
people ask for.

it also has "libraries":  Fomus, CLM (bill's entire 30+ year code  
base!), realitme OSC send/receive, SDIF, realtime MIDI send/receive,   
Csound, and graphics:  see the Plotter window (which can display/ 
sonify multiple layers of data) and Cellular Automata windows. you can  
write lisp code that generates plots, and convert plots back into lisp  
code.

its C++/Scheme framworks provides a realtime, metronome based  
scheduler, lets you load Audio plugins (AU or VST),  provides internal  
Audiofile and Midifile players, and lets you generate audio, midi, xml  
and .ly files. it runs (to the best of its ability) on three different  
operating systems.

It has tons of compositional support:  patterns, spectral composition  
operators, just tuning, scales and modes operators,  tons of mapping  
facilities.

It has two langauges, a beautiful ,  fast , fully functional Scheme  
(S7)  with lots of CTL2-isms built in, and SAL, which is what I use to  
teach with. Maybe i can post some examples of what students were able  
to do in Sal after one semester not knowing any computer language at  
all, its pretty remarkable. ill ask them if I can do that when they  
are back after the new years.








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