[PD] dealing with arguments and inlets

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jan 31, 2006, at 6:34 PM, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> Hallo,
> Stefan Turner hat gesagt: // Stefan Turner wrote:
>
>> This is a very cool idea. Virtually all my
>> abstractions have an inlet and ii (from iem) for each
>> argument: would definitely be better to have both in
>> one.
>
> Not for me. ;)
>
> I tend to see inlets and arguments as serving a different purpose.
> Instead of using lots of inlets my abstractions generally use only on
> or two inlets and internally [route] messages according to selectors.
>
> I would do so even with inlet tooltips or similar helpers, as I find
> it much more conventient to provide lots of selector-messages but only
> have a small amount of inlets in my abstractions, because I hate
> having to find the right inlet to connect to. For abstraction
> arguments it's slightly different as these are just input once, on
> object creation.  Although I like to even get rid of using too many
> arguments and instead just use one argument which internally gets
> transformed into a receiver that is connected to the same [route] as
> the inlet is. (So maybe inlets and arguments serve the same purpose
> after all?) Initialization then happens somewhere else (like in a
> [pool] in Memento).

The way I have been thinking is that the first inlet is the general  
inlet, and it can accept many types of messages.  Then the second inlet  
lines up with the first argument, the third inlet to the second  
argument, etc.   I think this is pretty clean and flexible, and I think  
it would be nice to have some kind of standard for this.

Obviously, it doesn't work for all objects, but I think it would be  
good to standardize on objects it does work for.

.hc

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