[PD-dev] abstractions

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> And Pd doesn't provide enough when it comes to supporting abstractions in 
> a way that makes them be able to use Pd in a way equivalent to how normal 
> externals can use Pd, and at a price not significantly greater.
> 
> For example, [#in] and [#out] aren't in such great shape since they became 
> abstractions, and they're significantly more complicated, because even the 
> simplest dynamic patching is complicated.
> 
> At Pd Convention 2004, there was a nice moment during the papers sessions, 
> where there was an apparent consensus that as many things as possible 
> should be made as abstractions. I still think about that. I like the idea, 
> and I've always liked the idea, and you can trace my appreciation of that 
> idea back to the original design of GridFlow, but it's not always so 
> feasible just by using Pd.

I think, Pd could benefit a lot by providing a default scripting
language to write operations like [range] which are tediuos to do as
an abstraction. Altough I'm not a fan of Tcl (and would prefer Lua),
Tcl would be a natural choice as it's available anyway. Ideally the
scripts would be saved within the patch, e.g. inside message boxes.
Oh wait, that's toxy! Hm, ... but toxy has a horrible syntax, which I
could never get around. But the general approach of it is a fantastic
idea.

The advantages of a scripted Pd classes are: For certain tasks,
especially those involving lots of repetition, patching is too much
work. And as pd-extended shows, if you pack each and every external
and abstraction into the pd-distribution, you either have to deal with
ugly long names or live with namespace pollution. 

Btw.: That's why today I tend to avoid installing lots of externals
and rather copy them to a project's folder when needed. Apart from
extensions that provide special functionality like Gem, msd, OSC or
iemfilters, I don't use "convenience collections" like maxlib anymore
- expect my own of course. Joao would probably call me a hardcore
user. ;)

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                                     _ ______footils.org__