[PD-dev] fontwidth and nogui

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Feb 19, 2012, at 1:15 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> Le 2012-02-19 à 10:05:00, Miller Puckette a écrit :
> 
>> It's hilarious - there's exactly one aspect of Pd run-time semantics that depends on screen location -- inlets/outlets of subpatches are numbered in left-to-right order on teh screen.  To to thins someone has to call gobj_getrect() on the inlet/outlet, which then not only has to report the northwest corner but the entire rectangle, which depends on font size.
> 
> You don't have to call gobj_getrect(), you need only te_xpix to figure out the order.
> 
> But run-time semantics that depend on screen location is a bug. When it's like that by design, it's a bug by design, because there's a bug in the design.
> 
> It's not as palpable as a bug in the implementation, which you can tell because the programme does not do as the design says. So people can argue endlessly about it, but you can still recognise that there's a problem with the design because people spend significant time talking about the gotcha, suggesting workarounds for the gotcha, teaching the gotcha, avoiding the gotcha, complaining about the gotcha ; and all along, things could have been better (unlike other things that look like a design bug but in which all solutions are equally annoying).
> 
> It's also not hilarious... I mean, people who want to make fun of Pd may and will laugh about it, but for the users, it's not a big big fun.

I think that the order of the [inlet]s and [outlet]s on the screen matching the order of the inlets and outlets on the abstraction that patch creates is a wonderful idea, far from being a bug, really a clever design.  The inlets and outlets on an object box are inescapably visually ordered.  That visual order can then be represented by a number in the implementation.  Therefore it fits that the visual placement of the [inlet] and [outlet] object would define the visual placement of the inlets and outlets.

Perhaps in the implementation, that doesn't need to be so.

.hc


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