of Microprocessors

644 MUSICAL ApPLICATIONS OF MICROPROCESSORS
selection itself, language preference tends to be more a matter of personal
experience (and taste) than scientific weighing of virtues and drawbacks. The
following, therefore, amounts to nothing more than a summary of the author's
biases, which, hopefully, are shared by a majority of readers.
The primary virtue of BASIC, of course, is its nearly universal implementation
on microcomputer systems. Drawbacks are many but most
serious are the lack of a true subroutine capability and a restricted variablenaming
convention. Its formal mechanism for linking to assembly language
leaves much to be desired, although tricks for enhancing it abound. These
shortcomings make writing and implementation of large programs in BASIC
more difficult than necessary. Nevertheless, BASIC is excellent for getting
started, and after all, has been used in programming examples so far.
FORTRAN is the grandaddy of programming languages and is now
available on some microcomputers. For musical purposes, it is very similar to
BASIC but with subroutine and naming restrictions removed. It is, however,
somewhat weaker in the handling of character string data than BASIC is.
Since FORTRAN is compiled, it is faster than a BASIC program, which is
usually interpreted. The best-known direct computer synthesis program,
MUSIC V, is implemented in FORTRAN but is far too big and dependent
on a big mainframe operating system to run on a microcomputer without
extensive modification. FORTRAN would be a good choice for someone
already familiar with it but should probably be bypassed by newcomers in
favor of a more "modern" language.
COBOL, the most widely used big-computer language, is unsuitable
for a music software system.
APL may be available on some microcomputers. While it is an excellent
problem-solving language for those adept in its use, it is an extremely
self-contained, "isolationist" language. This means that communication
with the operating system, assembly language programs, and data files is
poor or nonexistent. While not suitable for a music performance system, it
may be useful in exploring computer composition techniques,
The remaining are called "block-structured" languages because of the
way that statements are grouped together and the mechanism for variable
storage allocation. These run the range in sophistication from integers-only
subsets such as PLiM to overgrown monsters like ADA. Pascal, or its latest
incarnation, Modula-2, is a fairly well-known language of this type that is
extensively used in computer science education, largely due to the efforts of
the University of Southern California at San Diego (UCSD), who first
implemented it on a microcomputer. Many students are introduced to Pascal
as their first formal language (if they had not encountered BASIC on their
own earlier). A few years ago, Pascal promised to become the dominant
language for large microcomputer software systems such as synthesis
packages. This has not happened because of the lack of efficient optimizing
compilers and largely unspecified methods of I/O and linkage with the