[PD] subpatchers/abstractions (was: pd and jack)

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Sun Feb 2 09:53:52 CET 2003


Hallo,
Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> Other things I find excessively annoying is the inability to wrap
> objectbox/commentbox text properly. 

I like, how Max/MSP does it, it lets you resize everything with the
mouse. 

> I said I'd like abstractions that are included inside .pd files as if they
> were subpatchers, but otherwise work like abstractions. It would encourage
> aggressive abstraction; otherwise it is tempting to copypaste subpatchers
> in order to keep everything in one file.

I'd disagree here. Subpatches and abstractions (in Pd) are
fundamentally different. Abstractions are for, well, abstraction as a
concept, with local variables, creation arguments and all that, but
subpatches have two other goals. One is simply to hide things from
view (or let only a GUI be visible via GOP), the other is creating
named space inside a patch, that can be e.g. a target for
self-modifying messages or struct data. As abstractions can include
subpatches and as they pass on the graph-on-parent features, subpatch
functionality is available there as well. So if one needs aggressive
abstraction, and everyone needs that sooner or later, one should of
course use abstractions for that and not subpatches. Having
abstractions inside a patch is not aggressive abstraction but only
leads to many copies of functionality, that then isn't abstracted
(inside a patch file). 

ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__




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