On Sat, 31 Jan 2009, Ingo Scherzinger wrote:
I'm implementing a LCD user interface that has many, many similar pages
but the content and also the number of parameters differs on every
single page. No way to do it with abstractions!!! So if anything in all
of the pages changes it h a s to be copied back to the same place in the
other pages!
If any single object or group of objects appears on all of the pages and
may have to be changed in the future on all of the pages at once, then you
may make an abstraction with it, so that in the future you will have only
one file to change. If there are variable numbers of arguments to an
object that have to be passed around, though, you might be hitting a
limitation of pd.
I totally agree that using abstractions is the more economical way. So
actually I do use abstractions where it makes sense of course. However, this
doesn't eliminate the need of making "similar" copies of sub patches and
copying objects from one to the other.
Sure that the pd abstraction concept has lots of limitations, but also
many limitations are in the way that we think about the usefulness of
abstractions. It can even make sense to make an abstraction containing a
single object, for example, though it is probably often taught that
abstractions are meant to reduce the number of objects you have to look
at. Or perhaps you've been taught that abstractions are meant for things
that are not going to change in the future, whereas they can also be used
for abstracting out things that *will* change in the future, or so that
you can pass a patch as an argument to an instance of another
abstraction...
There's always one more way to use abstractions that hasn't been thought
about yet, and which will look weird once it's finally used, but which
will survive because it's simply useful for some purpose... any purpose.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec
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