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From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.multi-media
Subject: Re: A high-level language for animation & sound ??
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Date: 3 Oct 89 13:49:34 GMT
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> Anybody from CMU or BBN want to pipe up here :-)?

Well, as an ex-CMU person, maybe I qualify.  The reason I hadn't answered
is that, frankly, I think the basic answer to this question is "No."  As far
as I know, there is no good high-level language for the portable expression
of time-sequenced multimedia events such as animation and sound.  

Now, what probably made Amanda mention CMU and BBN is, of course, the fact
that both Andrew and Diamond can represent such events in their datastreams.
Indeed, both datastreams are even moderately portable.  I know much more
about Andrew, and can in fact attest that the Andrew data stream readily
represents animations and sound, and could be easily extended to video
(the extreme flexibility and extensibility of the Andrew model is one of
Andrew's real strong suits, actually).  The one word I sort of choked on,
however, in my first paragraph, was the word "good."

Even granting, for example, that PostScript is a "good" language for 
static imaging -- and I think there is some room for debate there --
we aren't even close to it for active processes.  If you like PostScript,
you could probably do a lot worse than to start with Display PostScript 
for such a language.  In my opinion, however, the proper design of such
languages is still very much a research question.

-- Nathaniel Borenstein, Bell Communications Research