On Nov 17, 2011, at 5:40 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > >> From: Miller Puckette <m...@ucsd.edu> >> To: Hans-Christoph Steiner <h...@at.or.at> >> Cc: pd-list@iem.at; IOhannes m zmoelnig <zmoel...@iem.at> >> Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 1:42 PM >> Subject: Re: [PD] "get" method for Pd >> >> T his leads to an interesting larger design issue. I've so far resisted >> the idea of using send/receive as a back channel for getting return >> values because of the unreadablity of the resulting patch. > > I was thinking: from that same vantage point, the core list classes > do a terrible job of processing lists. The resulting pd code for > sorting/splitting/etc.-- > stuff that is elementary in many other programming languages-- > either ends up being simplistic and inefficient, or efficient but > extremely weird and difficult to read (just have a look at the innards of > [listabs/list-drip] for example). Yet it's better to have the core > list classes plus a library of abstractions-- listabs-- that hides the > ugliness > necessary to get decent list processing to happen in Pd, than to not have > the list classes at all. > > Similarly, object chains with a big blank space between a [send] and its > corresponding [receive] aren't great, but if they can provide access to > desired data > about a pd instance, canvas instance, array, scalar-- i.e., things that don't > have > an inlet to hook into-- then we can build an abstraction around that to > provide a > unified interface for the user.
It sounds to me that this is unifying too many things. I think all this stuff should be gettable using the same style and technique (i.e. messages, inlets, outlets, etc) but not necessarily in the same object. The mediasettings lib provides a way to get and set the audio/midi settings, the iemguts library provides a means for getting and setting info about the patch and canvas. As long as all this libs and objects use the same idioms for interaction, then I think this is a much preferrable route than having a single centralized [info] object with hundreds of messages. One example of such an idiom is having a data outlet and a status outlet, like comport, hid, etc. Another example is the [textfile] way that you can go thru a list of things: load it, bang it get the next element, catch bang from right-outlet when the list is done. .hc ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country." Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. -Admiral Gene LeRocque _______________________________________________ Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list