[PD-dev] abstractions

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2008, Albert Graef wrote:

> The only advantage that Tcl has is, as you point out, that Pd already 
> uses it anyway.

Another advantage of Tcl is that the syntax is like that of Pd: 
space-separated elements, not much quoting necessary. In addition, 
elements missing from Pd and characters missing from Pd together suggest 
making it more like Tcl, because those missing characters correspond to 
the special characters in Tcl that are implement the features most missing 
from Pd.

> Now I know how popular functional programming languages are with
> programmers raised on a diet of C, Python and Java ;-), but the fact is
> that FPLs are a nice match for Pd (which is a kind of functional
> programming language itself)

You got to be kidding. Perhaps you are using another definition of 
functional language. The Pd/MAX message system (non-signal) is most likely 
the most stateful (non-functional) dataflow language around. By functional 
it is usually meant something fairly stateless or in which you can largely 
avoid statelessness whenever it makes sense. Academic dataflow languages 
(in computer science depts I mean) are quite stateless, whereas Pd/MAX lie 
at the opposite end of the spectrum.

> and typically the scripts are much more concise and expressive than 
> anything you can write in more traditional languages.

Well, it depends a lot. Functional problems will have short functional 
solutions, and imperative problems will have short imperative solutions.

> If Pd provided some infrastructure there (maybe [declare] could already 
> be used for that purpose?), scripting would become as easy as pie, and 
> we won't have to battle over which scripting language is best, because 
> there are already quite a few to choose from.

You can't wait for Pd to support anything in particular.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec