Hallo, Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote: > On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, Miller Puckette wrote: > > >But to return to the original question, if my 'improvement' of > >pack destroys the nice symmetry of pack and unpack arguments, this > >certainly calls the design of unlack into question, since the only > >reason its arguments are as they are is that they were designed so > >in the context of a no-longer-extant pack. > > Is symmetry so important? > > Why is it that leftmost inlet is special, not only in terms of > implementation (the object _is_ its own left inlet except in case of > NOINLET) but also that it is the 'active' inlet for most classes? > Because there's no special built-in outlet in those same objects...
Hm, but mostly there is, at least "kind of": The hot left-most inlet corresponds to the right-to-left triggering of many objects. [unpack] | / [pack] will fire only once because of this. In general this convention leads to the "oriental" right-to-left reading direction one often uses when deciphering Pd-patches. > Why are some classes using the reverse order? [timer], [realtime], > [cputime]. For those objects, messages need to be sent left-to-right; the > rightmost inlet triggers output. It's likely because of the nice symmetry in the following common idiom to get inter-onset intervals: [t b b] | | [timer] [timer] (and its relatives to some extent) is an object that is used in a hot-to-cold fashion more often than in the cold-to-hot direction common with most other objects like [pack] etc. Ciao -- Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__ _______________________________________________ PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list