[PD] Pd's wikipedia page

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, david golightly wrote:

> I think though it would be confusing to associate "pointers" in C with
> "pointers" in Pd.  They are related but not exactly equivalent
> concepts.

They don't need to be exactly equivalent.

However it's good to know that pointer arithmetic doesn't exist in most
languages, and neither does reinterpret_cast<> (typecasting pointers
between not-necessarily-compatible types). For those two reasons I
wouldn't teach Pd pointers using a C tutorial.

I would have said, try finding another tutorial on pointers, for another 
language, but Pd's pointers are rather peculiar. I'd rather have them work 
as in Perl or Python, but instead it's some kind of weak-pointer system in 
which everything revolves around the canvas that owns the struct.

(BTW: Some other languages may call pointers "references" instead and
insist that they aren't pointers, but I consider those two words as
largely equivalent.)

> And we don't necessarily need to mention "pointers" on the Wikipedia
> site

Pd has only three atom types and "pointer" is one of them. That's 
certainly worth mentioning. It's also worth mentioning because it was the 
first big new feature in Pd, ever.

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