[PD-dev] [once] default closed...

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> From what I know most programming languages are more likely to adhere 
> consistency of function arguments.

Everything that allows default arguments, except pd, doesn't enforce one 
value of default value, and instead require that a default value be 
supplied. This is implemented in C++, Java (1.5?), Python, Ruby, Tcl, 
CommonLISP, and a bunch more.

> Words can be very vague, especially when you consider that many 
> programmers will be programming in a language that is not their native 
> tongue.  So it seems quite difficult to be strictly adherent to the 
> words.

Maybe you'd like to study the case of Ruby. This is a weird language in 
the sense that it's been written with English words by a bunch of Japanese 
people who live in Japan and who use Japanese as their main language.

NotImplementError used to be the name of a kind of error. The Array class 
has a method called "indexes". But in general it wasn't so much the naming 
in the code that was bad... when I started 6 years ago, the manual was 
saying things like "Instance variables are belong to the certain object."

> But words are how humans communicate with each other, so the meaning of 
> the language should be given attention.

Right.

> I personally feel that its not more linguistically consistent to have 
> [once] default open when it has no argument.  But this is inconsistent 
> in usage with similar objects ([spigot]...).

What Would Demux Do?

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