[PD-announce] [PD] the end of type restrictions

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sat, 21 Jul 2007, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>>   http://artengine.ca/desiredata/gallery/unpack-mixed.png
> Oh, that last one is tricky IMO. Even when you obviously don't care
> about patch compatibility to other Pds anymore,

Well, I obviously care about compatibility, else I'd be working something 
completely different than DesireData. The question here is: what is 
compatibility? (what is it that DesireData has to be compatible with?)

If you find anything incompatible with PureData in DesireData at the level 
of running existing patches, please tell me, I'd like to make a list. 
Currently the ones that I can think of are the uses of DS/gpointers and 
Toxy and the GUI externals, but then I make my list with what my 
conception of compatibility is.

> making [unpack 0 0 0] behave as you suggest may break even old patches 
> and abstractions, that rely on nothing else than a float getting through 
> a 0 in "unpack".

Can patches rely on that as a feature any more than they may rely on 
"stack overflow" happening at a specific moment rather than any other? 
I've also made patches that don't produce the same result at all when 
using 64-bit floats... without using any externs nor anything that anyone 
would call a bug...

> Why don't you use [unpack a a a] like in trigger?

because "a" in [trigger] is thought of as "anything" which is a category 
of messages, not of atoms. I think that using "a" here can't have this 
meaning in this context - actually we could use the letter "a" here and 
say that it means "atom" instead of "anything" and it would be ok, but I'd 
rather use another letter in case later some other object needs both a 
letter for "anything" and a letter for "atom". Then I thought about "e" 
for "element"...

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada