[PD-dev] abstractions

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jul 12, 2008, at 9:35 AM, Albert Graef wrote:

> Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>> 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.
>
> So what? Most FPLs deal with state just fine. Even purely functional
> languages do, through special abstractions like streams or monads. At
> the end of the day, Pd objects are just boxes taking inputs and
> producing outputs, which can be programmed in FPLs quite easily. And
> FPLs provide the tools to express such transformations in a convenient
> way, such as pattern-matching (a.k.a. symbolic rewriting) and higher
> order functions.
>
> But my point was certainly *not* to propose an FPL as Pd's default
> scripting language. My point is that it would be nice to have just a
> little infrastructure to better support language interfaces in  
> general,
> no matter whether Pd will provide some default scripting interface in
> the future or not.
>
>> Well, it depends a lot. Functional problems will have short  
>> functional
>> solutions, and imperative problems will have short imperative  
>> solutions.
>
> Well, I wouldn't talk about "functional" or "imperative problems"  
> here,
> but it's certainly true that some stuff tends to be easier in one
> language and other stuff in another one. However, that just  
> illustrates
> my point that it's better to have an interface that accomodates
> different scripting languages, instead of singling out Tcl as the  
> be all
> and end all of it.
>
>> You can't wait for Pd to support anything in particular.
>
> I won't. But would it really hurt if [declare] supported, say, a - 
> script
> option so that a language external could inspect that attribute of a
> patch and use it as the name of a script to be loaded? That just needs
> one routine in the plugin API which allows externals to read the
> attributes of a patch (which might be there already, I haven't checked
> lately).

Implement it, and we'll see if it hurts. :)  Sounds worth trying.

.hc


>
> Cheers,
> Albert
>
> -- 
> Dr. Albert Gr"af
> Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
> Email:  Dr.Graef at t-online.de, ag at muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
> WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pd-dev mailing list
> Pd-dev at iem.at
> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-dev



------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----

Using ReBirth is like trying to play an 808 with a long stick.    - 
David Zicarelli