[PD-dev] PD patches in XML

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Martin Peach wrote:
> Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> > problem is that object ID's change too often, because if an object is
> > deleted, its ID is not skipped, and a bunch of objects are renumbered just
> > so that the ID is not skipped, because there is no way in the format to
> > skip one. I think this has to be solved in the pd internals first, in the
> > runtime storage of a patch, because it's where the renumbering (or the
> > ignoring of numbering) normally happens.
> This might be a good time to introduce the Globally Unique Identifer, 
> perhaps in the form of a 32-bit random number that is generated for each 
> object in a patch and never reused -- the running pd program would 
> maintain a list of all GUIDs in use in the current session.

Well, I was thinking of something along the lines of a locally unique
identifier, whose scope is exactly one patcher, because the problem with
changing indices happens exactly at the patcher level. I don't know what
GUID's would bring at this point. I can't think of any nice way of
introducing GUID's easily in the .pd format except by making each object
two lines of code instead of one. What do you have in mind?

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju