[PD] dynamic-named arrays

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> The subpatch/abstraction difficulty is more a "linguistic" problem. As
> abstractions could also be described as "subpatches", because they are
> subordinate patches inside another patch, it is easy to confuse them
> with the real subpatches according to Pd vocabulary. 

Throwing some pseudorandom ideas in:

Now that I think about it, it is akin to the word "subprogram", which has
been traditionally a name for what is now called "procedure" or
"method". (don't use the word "subroutine" in front of me!)

Well, just by looking at the construction of that word, "subprogram" could
be any kind of program element that can stand as a program on its own,
where "on its own" is quite loosely defined. Therefore in modern
programming a "subprogram" could be easily made to mean a class, for
example.

I'm making a parallel with mathematics, where subsets are sets, and
subgroups are groups, and subspaces are spaces, and wondering whether the
word "subprogram" could follow that.

Now, back to "subpatches":

If it were following the compsci convention, "subpatch" would be the name
for an abstraction, but right now, it's more like "blocks" in C (loose
braces, just a nonautonomous subsection of a procedure).

If it were following the math convention, "subpatch" would possibly be a
more general name inclusive of several concepts but maybe not what is
currently called a "subpatch", depending on how "stands on its own" gets
defined here.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju