Keywords: Blue, Csound

Future Enhancements
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## Future Enhancements

As blue has developed over time, and as the ways to use it are being augmented with each new build, I'm always looking for new ways to make the process of working with blue easier. My recent work with the Python SoundObject and the External SoundObject have shown me that there's a lot of neat things that can be done with blue, things I really didn't account for when I first built blue, and would now love to handle. For the future, in addition to developing more and more tools for blue itself, it would be nice to be able to have more conventional coding tools to aid scripters in the script work for blue. I'm aware of the limitations for debugging and console output right now in blue, but, then again, all of the scripting additions to blue are rather young, and blue's development continues every day.

For immediate goals, I've written down the following as things I should look into now:

Python test console for the PythonObject

Like the test button, but would show all output to stdout as it looks before being processed by blue, as well as showing all output to stderr.

Language neutral script library

With the PythonLib for the Python SoundObject, it's nice to have a portable way of keeping all of the scripts that can be used with blue along with blue, if you happen to be carrying your work around with you. I think that this ability would be fantastic for the external SoundObject. already i have a method that returns the absolute path to the lib directory of blue; with this, I think it should be possible that before blue runs any script, it could look for a "<BLUE_SCRIPT_LIB>" constant of some sort and do a text replace to put in the absolute path to the lib directory. that way, you could do something like:

    from <BLUE_SCRIPT_LIB>.myLibrary import *

as well as use a commandline like:

perl <BLUE_SCRIPT_LIB>/myLibrary/myProgram -input $infile

Which would make the library accessible from any system. the nice thing about something like this is that I could then include other people's script libraries and programs as part of the blue release, or other people may wish to advertise that their scripts are usable within blue and have a place to install it in that is easily accessible on any blue system. (For example, using the above convention, if I have a blue work file that repeatedly calls a library that someone else developed, I can put that library in my lib dir, use the convention above, and then say if someone else wanted to run that file or if I was bringing that file to another computer, all I'd have to do is install the library in the lib directory and everything should work, as opposed to having to do a find and replace on ever call to the library to change the path to where it is on the new computer.)

Finding a text editor component thats made for programming

This would be fantastic, to find a Java text component that I can swap in that would handle things like syntax-hilighting of different languages, maybe has some kind of help system for syntax and references, etc. I haven't found one I could easily use or modify yet, but hopefully something will come along.

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