I am a competent programmer in BASIC and am a rather quick study, and would like to appeal to computer-savvy anoraks out there.

I lost numerous BASIC programs late last month and am using the 'opportunity' (quote from trained-pianist) to upgrade my brain.

Can anyone recommend an absolutely free or at least only mildly costly computer programming language into which I can translate my (lost) algorithmic composition tools? It need not be object based and can be command-line based. I prefer command-line programming because objects (as in Patchwork, Max, etc) are simply ugly and cause me to cry tears of indignant frustration at their ugliness*.

Minimum requirements are at least some sort of engine that does typical set-theoretical transformations eg transposition, inversion; but perhaps also can take a chain of numeric values and offer options for translating them into rhythmic durations

*a yes, even the cloyingly pretty maquettes used in IRCAM software. iVomit
*b I use Max for electronic sound manipulation/ live shit, but that's b/c I have gotten used to it (sort of).

I have a couple of ideas, but I don't want to suggest something to you that you'll end up finding frustrating.  Could you describe a particular, representative, task that you would want a program to do? Not just a part of it, like the examples you gave.  In particular, the ways in which you would interact with the program might be important (whether you want to be typing in numbers at the command-line, reading data-files, entering stuff into windows applications, blah blah blah).

In general, most music-geared software deals with synthesis as opposed to more algorithmic stuff; most of the latter stuff tends to be done by hand (=coded from scratch without third-party tools).  I have a certain amount of experience when it comes to computer-assisted composition (though not really synthesis) and, for my last batch of stuff I changed programming language and it simplified things many, many times (because it was much easier to deal with lists, sets, and arrays in).

Hey EJ, long time no hear.

I will try this Python (on my Mac, mind you) and will report back duly.

Please do keep this thread open -- eye e more suggestions are always welcome

I'm not the only one that's been using Chipmunk BASIC then...
This thread is making me consider Python as well.
No real time at the moment, but perhaps I'll see how you all get on first!

I rather have this sort of relationship with my programs as well.

Anyway, Python is surely an interesting and popular language.  There is, also, a pitch class library available for it here that might be worth a gander (though I remain skeptical as to the utility of such a library in general).  Let us know how you get on exploring it. 

I feel somewhat compelled to speak of my own personal choice of programming language for these sort of tasks, Haskell.   As I said before, it's good for doing stuff with lists (it does a lot of other very heavy duty stuff as well, but that's not for here)*.

A couple of examples.  It has a 'map' command that transfers a function on, say numbers, to a function on lists of number, by applying it to each element.

So say I defined my transpose function as


Then if I wanted to transpose or invert the pitch-class set [0,4,7] by a 8 semitones I'd write


(output [8,0,3])

If I wanted to write a function that would, given a pcset, return all the present intervals, I'd do it as follows


(I find these (mathematical) set-theoretic styles of definitions of functions to be really pleasant to write).

Then if I typed

 

I'd get the output [0,9,7,3,0,10,5,2,0].  If I wanted to remove the duplicate entries there's a function called 'nub' that does that.

There are plenty of other list* operations that I occasionally find myself lusting after when I'm programming in other languages.

*I've heard it said that python is pretty hand when it comes to list-manipulation as well, but I'm not familiar enough with it to comment.

Yeah, I noticed that when I was checking stuff up earlier today.  Pretty nice innit?