R: [PD] Re: [PD-announce] clr: externals in CLR assemblies

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, Thomas Grill wrote:

> A thought a bit about the naming of functions for the Pd domain and also
> the external classes. I find it a bit too verbose. Are you sure that
> it's necessary to call it "DelegateWithoutArguments"  or "PostMessage"
> when the functions are in their own namespace? It's really my personal
> taste, but i would prefer sticking closer to the naming of the original
> PD API functions (and i admit i don't like typing that much...)

What's disturbing about PostMessage() is that, if I guess what it does, it
doesn't post what is normally called a Message in Pd, and that may be
confusing to people learning the API. Sometimes less is more and thus I
think post() is better.

> What i'm also wondering about is the mixture of class and objects
> initialization in SetUp (wouldn't Main be a better choice, since that's
> already reserved in C#?).

If following C# conventions has any practical advantage, then C# 
conventions should be followed. For anything else, it should be as close 
as possible to Pd's C API. Bonus points if there is a way to guess the C# 
API from knowing the C API or the Flext API.

BTW, anyone looked at SWIG ? It could provide a multilanguage interface to
Pd's API and/or Flext's API. SWIG generates wrappers from C++ code to
Python, Ruby, Perl, Java, C#, Tcl, PHP, Lua, and several kinds of LISP
(Guile, AllegroCL, CMUCL, ...).

SWIG might be the key to unifying the Pd API in various programming
languages (currently, PyExt, GridFlow, k_guile, all do things quite
differently from each other). Note that I don't want a "common
denominator" API which would prevent from using any special features of a
given language in the Pd API for that language. Nevertheless I would like
language-specific APIs to be easy to guess (deduce) so that it's easy to
start writing externals in language X for someone who has general
experience in language X and experience in writing Pd externals in
language Y.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada