Glossary

IDE

Integrated Development Environment, in the case of supercollider the program scide. It combines an editor, the execution engine, the debugging output and the help system into one user interface.

Server (program)

A server program is a program that runs standalone, usually without an user interface, and provides services for client programs via a communication channel.

In supercollider, the program scsynth is a server: it runs standalone and listens for commands comming from the IDE or other programs via network.

Syntax

In programming, the syntax of a programming language is the set of rules that specifies the allowed combinations of symbols to create correctly structured expressions and statements. It does not, however, say anything about the meaning (or semantics) of those statements.

To compare it with the "language" of mathematical formulas:

• =2 %3 is syntactically incorrect: it simply doesn't makes sense.
• 0 = 1 is syntactically correct, but semantically wrong.
• 5=4+1 is syntactically and semantically correct.

UGen (or Unit Generator)

A unit generator in SuperCollider is an object that processes or generates sound. There are many types of unit generators, like, for various forms of noise, periodic signals, but also filtering etc.

For more information about UGens see http://doc.sccode.org/Guides/UGens-and-Synths.html