[GEM-dev] gem and init to 0

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Mar 9, 2009, at 9:45 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>> So it seems that gem objects are initing everything to zero, things  
>> like colorRGB and translateXYZ don't work if you specify less than  
>> three values.  It seems to me that those missing values should be  
>> set to zero, since that is how Pd generally works,
>
>
> hmm, i would prefer if elements that are used wrongly would not  
> create at all.
>
> e.g. if you make an object [translateXYZ 0 1] you will get an error  
> message on the console "[translateXYZ]: needs 0 or 3 arguments".
> users should read the console and properly create the objects.
> i understand that nobody will have a look at the console everytime  
> an object has been created.
> so they should be guided by some feedback: the best feedback i can  
> imagine right now would be to fail to create the object.
>
> the alternative would be to provide wrong default arguments. i cal  
> lthem "wrong" because they will most likely be wrong in most cases.  
> therefore i prefer to not impose them on the users.

Why is that wrong?  I seems perfectly natural to me in Pd land, and I  
bring this up because students did exactly this.  Values initialize to  
zero when not specified.  There are definitely precedents to this in  
Pd-vanilla, why should Gem be different than Pd?

The other side of this question is: where is the harm in doing this?   
Would this cause any problems to make Gem be more like Pd?

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> mfg,asdr
> IOhannes
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> [pack 0 ]



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