[PD] Question on RTC

Mike McGonagle mjmogo at gmail.com
Mon Apr 16 18:49:12 CEST 2007


Frank,

I was working with some of the RTC stuff over the weekend and I had a
question about the abstraction 'xrandom'. While I understand that you
were probably basing this on the 'xrandom' from the Max version of
this, I would think that as is, 'xrandom' is a little different from
similar objects.

As this is based on the 'urne' abstraction, and it seems to follow the
same premise as the 'textfile' and 'qlist' objects, I would think that
'xrandom' would do this as well.

Basically, the difference that I see is that each of these other
objects ('urne', 'textfile', etc.), all produce an output on the left
as long as there is more to output, and bangs on the right outlet
after the list is done, and does NOT output anything on the right.

'xrandom', on the other hand, DOES produce an output on the LEFT at
the same time it is outputting a bang on the right to indicate that
the list of objects is complete. This seems a little cumbersome, as
this output on the LEFT is actually the first element from the next
iteration of the set. This gives a false indication as to where the
list of numbers ends. On the first iteration through the list, it
would send out one more item than is in the list, and each subsequent
iteration is "shifted" by one element.

While I can see that this would not really be an issue if you are not
using the 'end of list' bang on the right outlet, but if you are, it
doesn't break the list at the real boundries.

To change this behaviour, I removed the 'bang' from the [clear, bang(
message that gets sent at the end of the iteration.

So, is what I am describing better done using other means? Is
'xrandom' expected to be used as a "bang as much as you want" type of
abstraction? Is this behaviour based on the RTC/Max version? Does any
of this make sense?


Mike McG


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