[PD-dev] abstractions

[Albert Graef]

Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> You got to be kidding. Perhaps you are using another definition of
> functional language. The Pd/MAX message system (non-signal) is most
> likely the most stateful (non-functional) dataflow language around.

So what? Most FPLs deal with state just fine. Even purely functional
languages do, through special abstractions like streams or monads. At
the end of the day, Pd objects are just boxes taking inputs and
producing outputs, which can be programmed in FPLs quite easily. And
FPLs provide the tools to express such transformations in a convenient
way, such as pattern-matching (a.k.a. symbolic rewriting) and higher
order functions.

But my point was certainly *not* to propose an FPL as Pd's default
scripting language. My point is that it would be nice to have just a
little infrastructure to better support language interfaces in general,
no matter whether Pd will provide some default scripting interface in
the future or not.

> Well, it depends a lot. Functional problems will have short functional
> solutions, and imperative problems will have short imperative solutions.

Well, I wouldn't talk about "functional" or "imperative problems" here,
but it's certainly true that some stuff tends to be easier in one
language and other stuff in another one. However, that just illustrates
my point that it's better to have an interface that accomodates
different scripting languages, instead of singling out Tcl as the be all
and end all of it.

> You can't wait for Pd to support anything in particular.

I won't. But would it really hurt if [declare] supported, say, a -script
option so that a language external could inspect that attribute of a
patch and use it as the name of a script to be loaded? That just needs
one routine in the plugin API which allows externals to read the
attributes of a patch (which might be there already, I haven't checked
lately).

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr.Graef at t-online.de, ag at muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag