[PD-dev] Re: Restructuring of CVS/externals

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Feb 3, 2006, at 12:31 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>> I could be convinced to use "_to_", but "to" aka [mtof] is not clear.
>> Another idea is "->".  [hertz->midi], [hsv->rgb].  Actually, I think I
>> might like "->" even better.
>
> Precedent for "->" includes Scheme:
>
> (symbol->string 'bang) gives "bang"
> (string->symbol "bang") gives bang
>
>> While I am at it, I think that we should try to come up with  
>> meaningful
>> names. We have plenty of memory these days, even on 10 year old
>> computers, we don't need to use short names.
>
> What we don't have plenty of, is screen space, especially when Pd eats  
> it
> horizontally and doesn't let people resize objectboxes to their width  
> of
> choice.

Encapsulation is the key to writing good software in any language, call  
it functions, procedures, methods, objects, abstractions, subpatches,  
whatever.  If you are writing patches that don't fit on 800x600 using  
long names, I think you need to encapsulate more.

Its kind of like saying we should all turn our screens 90 degrees so  
that we can write longer functions in C. ;)

>> And its also now pretty clearly established in computer science that
>> clear naming saves much more time than short names.  Its all about
>> avoiding bugs.
>
> clear names are clearer.
> short names are shorter.
> however, long names aren't necessarily clearer...

Yes but clear names tend to be longer.

> what i said about "_to_" wasn't too serious, but i don't know of a good
> alternative. GF has [#rgb_to_yuv] and [#rgb_to_greyscale], but also has
> [#import] which turns anything to a grid, and [#export], which  
> converts a
> grid to a seq of floats, and [#export_list], which converts a grid to a
> list, and [#export_symbol], which converts a grid to a symbol, so i'm  
> not
> all consistent about it.

How about:
[#rgb->yuv]
[#rgb->grayscale]   (this happens to be a clear name that is not short  
:)
[#->list]
[#->symbol]

Tho "export" makes sense in that context too.

.hc




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