#learningsc

Variables can store numbers, words, UGens, functions or entire patches

lower case a-z are default, ready declared environment variables

key word ‘var’ allows declaration of bespoke variables

their scope is local to function or block

I've been playing with Supercollider without reading the manual. I am just reading the manual now and am recording some revelations for personal use here.

Reading

Read from the middle (inner most function) out - nesting unpacks poetically

Evaluation

Evaluate Maths left to right: 10 + 5 * 4 = 60 !! (not 30)

Equivalence of Functional vs receiver notation:

functional: ("echo", 20) and rand(100)

receiver: ("echo".dup) 100.rand

So message ( arg ) == arg.message

and message ( arg1, arg2 ) == arg1.message( arg2 )

Style dictates when to use which.

UGens generally written as receiver.message (SinOsc.ar())

Receiver notation can string together messages, which can be more readable than high levels of nesting

{1000.0.rand.round(0.01).postln}.dup(100).postln.sort.plot

Enclosures

" Quotation marks " enclose a string of chars to create a string

' single quotes ' create symbols, as does a \backslash

'aSymbol' == \aSymbol (see String and Symbol help for more)

( parentheses ) enclose argument lists and force precedence

[ brackets ] define a collection of items - including Arrays which can mix data types and receive messages

{ braces } define functions

dup(random(1000.0), 3) // picks a number, duplicates it

dup({rand(1000.0)}, 3) // duplicates the rand function