[PD-dev] "object" lib

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sat, 8 Apr 2006, carmen wrote:

> inside a patch needing a few additional methods (assuming it has a
> single inlet), i'd just wire in any number of abstractions in series.

You mean in series or nested?

> inside those abstractions would be a route, for the methods which the
> mixin abstractions implement..

and it's even possible to make messages be both processed and continue to
a nested abstraction. however, what is very much unlike OOP inheritance
about it, is that the $0 is different. It's also possible to do the same
message-forwarding tricks in most OOP languages (except C++ and some
others) but still a lot of things get done using one instance using of 
several.

one place where the nested abstractions (or series of abstractions)  
approach loses is in cases where an object is sending messages to itself,
as a matter of efficient internal organisation (especially useful in
abstract classes). In a system in which messages don't have return-values,
it's damn difficult to use such a feature anyway, but there would be
something feasible about it, if $0 were the same in the "subinstance"  
(which corresponds to a superclass: sub because it's inside, super because
it represents something more general.)

Mixin inheritance (as it is in Ruby, Strongtalk, CLOS or Self) is 
currently unimplementable in PureData, because you can't automatically 
eliminate duplicate "subinstances".

> im fairly sure i would consider my OSC/message recording things a mixin
> as well, simply create one in a subpatch, and you have a local
> send/recieve variable which can forward arbitrary messages to the global
> 'recording agent'..similar to AOP logging..

er, I'm not sure what this has to do with AOP and not with just a global
variable. Where exactly does an object gets automatically wrapped? The way
I can explain it, in OOP a subclass wraps a superclass, but in AOP, you
can also have a superclass wrap a subclass, and even both at the same
time, and also unrelated superclasses can wrap each other if they meet in
a certain subclass, and I mean all automatical wrappers that you never
need to explicitly specify. (i'm just thinking of CLOS method lookup,
haven't tried other AOP systems)

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