… in what is now the dominant form of electronic computation. Various other systems existed before and since, and are currently used.
There are and have long been programmable analog computers (electrical, mechanical, and hydraulic) as well.
Intel and others have experimented with analog components for “weighting” with their neuromorphic chips.
There is also a long history with ternary computers, which uses three states: -1, 0, +1. (There was a mechanical ternary computer invented in 1840.) While the electrical components for this are largely non-existent it in theory could be made commercial. Three states isn’t necessarily a limit.
There is also another non binary (non von Neumann) computer, that each of us as electronic musicians have access to, and can use for programming — CV.
This can be implemented using either a hybrid analog/digital form, or in pure electronic analog form. Think of all the quantities it can represent beyond pitch. Run it fast enough it becomes the audio itself. Most systems are inherently parallel. Operations can include addition/subtraction, storing/recall, table look up, inversion, multiplication, looping, conditionals, slew, log and exponential, random functions, continuous incrementing/decrementing, min/max, Boolean logic, fuzzy logic, feedback, … i could go on but let’s save that for another post.
Many electronic musicians spend a great deal of time programming (patching) in CV, and while that is not thought of as “coding”, it certainly could qualify as such. In fact i think we could benefit from considering it as such and applying the same disciplines.
What is object oriented CV ? (I suggest that’s done all the time btw.) What about a CV subroutine ? High-level vs. low-level. Again i could go on …