[PD-dev] "object" lib

[Chris McCormick]

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 05:25:41AM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Apr 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> > Pd is not an object-oriented programming language, so a classtree is
> > totally irrelevant.
> 
> There are things that are both called OOP and don't have classes.  
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_programming_language)

So? That isn't at all why Pd shouldn't be considered OOP. Puredata
doesn't even properly support this type of 'copy-and-modify' inheritance
that Self and Javascript do. A save operation is required in between,
and then if another save operation is performed all "objects" of the
same "type" are modified. It's a very different behaviour to those two
languages.

> I've got a problem with that taxonomy. I'd rather say that almost all OOP
> languages are procedural: that is because the concept of method is an
> extension of the concept of procedure.

What is a method in Puredata?

I think it's best not to try and cram OOP concepts into this perfectly
good dataflow language.

> Even putting PureData in the dataflow category is debatable, because
> there's too much dependency on execution order (not really because [t]
> exists, but because [t] has to be used so often!).

The way Pd handles execution order makes it part of a subset of dataflow
languages that also handle execution order explicitly. If you think that
execution order has to be handled in one certain way in all dataflow
languages then your definition is more narrow than mine.

That said, the name "object" is patently ridiculous given how generic
a term it is. I would try and find something better (just incase Miller
one day decides to crow-bar OO proper into Pd).

Best rgds,

Chris.

-------------------
chris at mccormick.cx
http://mccormick.cx