[PD-dev] $0 in messages, was: multiple $arg-expansion

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> Ah, I guess I am stuck on good ol' bourne shell ;).  But isn't that bash
> stuff just a hack to get math into bourne shell syntax?  I don't think
> its the kind of thing we want to emulate.

It depends on whether you prefer just-a-hack in the language itself or 
just-a-hack in every patch that can't use the language hack.

Doing message-based math in Pd can be pretty tortuous sometimes, and few 
people are really trained into converting math formulas into small Pd 
objects like [+] [*] [swap] [pack] [unpack].

For the rest of us (mere mortals) there is [expr].

In PureUnity I can't use [expr] in situations where the point is to test 
[+] [*] etc, so I do all the tortuous stuff.

> I think that its much cleaner to make the objects receive messages on
> inlets than get into the whacky bash syntax.

Yeah, I wouldn't especially pick bash's syntax in this case but I don't
know what else it could be. My current favourite is the one like $a1[1]
that I described in another email today. That syntax doesn't do any
arithmetic but it introduces multi-inlet messageboxes. (for the
arithmetic, [expr] is good enough for me)

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada