[PD-dev] PD patches in XML

[Martin Peach]

Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> problem is that object ID's change too often, because if an object is
> deleted, its ID is not skipped, and a bunch of objects are renumbered just
> so that the ID is not skipped, because there is no way in the format to
> skip one. I think this has to be solved in the pd internals first, in the
> runtime storage of a patch, because it's where the renumbering (or the
> ignoring of numbering) normally happens.

This might be a good time to introduce the Globally Unique Identifer, 
perhaps in the form of a 32-bit random number that is generated for each 
object in a patch and never reused -- the running pd program would 
maintain a list of all GUIDs in use in the current session.
The same approach could be used with the externs, in order to 
discriminate among externs with the same name, but this requires a 
central repository and registration system...

Martin