[PD-dev] A Solution: abstraction and external name collisions

[zmoelnig at iem.at]

Zitiere "B. Bogart" <ben at ekran.org>:

> Hey all,
> 
> 
> Could this method be applied to externals as well?
> 
> markex/counter or mex/counter
> cxc/counter
> cyclone/counter or cyc/counter
> 
> Of course you break all the old patches if you have to use new names, 
> but it provides a facility where you use the object you want rather than

this reminds me of my (long ago) proposal to use "." (a dot) as a separator
between library name and external.
my implementation (which i posted to the list) was done in pd (and not in the
libraries): upon loading the library name was automatically prefixed to the
actual object-name, eg "Gem.scale".

of course the "."-separator was just an arbitrary decision and could easily be
changed to anything (i was thinking of "::" but "/" might do as well)

everything was transparent to the user, as the original name was kept too.
so after loading (e.g.) Gem, there was an object with 2 names (primary)
"Gem.scale" and (alias) "scale". after loading cyclone there was an additional
"cyclone.scale".

this has been rejected.


> 
> markex version you type markex/counter.

the problem arises with multi-named libaries: if i can load Gem both with "-lib
Gem" and "-lib gem" (eg. under windos) the scale object will either be called
[Gem.scale] or [gem.scale]. this makes patches non-portable.

however, last time we discussed this, there was an idea to introduce
library-aliases - either at the command line or at run-time.
probably something like "pd -lib cyclone=cyc:zexy:iemlib1=iem:iemlib2=iem"


> So there are issues with this method but I think it has potential. 
> Obviously it could use development but I think the concept has some 
> validity. In a way this is creating a seperate namspace for each set of
> 
> abstractions/externals. They could also be multiple levels deep:
> 
> cvs/markex/counter
> cvs/cyclone/counter
> markex/counter
> cyclone/counter

could be solved by aliases too:
"pd -lib /usr/lib/pd/extra/marke=markex:~/cvs/markex/markex=cvs/markex"

as i remember now, the problem with my automatic namespacing was, that calling
"pd -lib zexy" and "pd -lib ./zexy" resulted in 2 separate namespaces, e.g
[zexy/z~] and [./zexy/z~] which produced non-portable patches.
but this could be avoided with aliasing.

> 
> Just throught I would throw it out there as fast as it popped into my 
> brain.
> 
> Any comments?
> 

mfg.as.dr
IOhannes