[PD] setable values

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Tim Blechmann hat gesagt: // Tim Blechmann wrote:

> first of all:
> it will not break anything. the cvs-pd will have a feature, the msp pd
> won't have. a msp patch will run on the cvs.

You cheat: It *will* break msp-pd, which won't run patches done on
cvs-pd if those use your "set value". And to me at least MSP Pd is the
canonical definition of the Pd syntax.

> and: i'm convinced that it's not useful to keep pd as it is, just to
> remain the compatibility between cvs and msp. what we need is some way
> to integrate useful or neccessary stuff (like this, like the fftw
> support, like guenter's tooltips, like the threaded soundfiler, like
> thomas's simd stuffa) to the main pd branch. 

Changing builtin objects is *not* just adding a new "feature".  You
are trying to change the *rules* of the Pd *language*, which all Pd
versions still share.

> if each version of pd will be compatible to lower versions, i don't see
> any problem at all ... it's better than finding a workaround...

Either way I'd like to keep all current versions at least be able to
understand each other, to speak the same language. If you want to
extend the language by defining new words, that's fine. That's what
functions or typedefs in programming languages do, and that's what
externals do in Pd. 

But your change is like changing a standard header file, so to say.
Why do you want to introduce an incompatibility without need? Write an
external and everyone is happy. value is defined using 114 lines of
code, so writing an extended "value" external would be done in some
minutes, it just means adding one function of 3 or 4 lines code. If
you keep the code similar to the "value" code then it would be easy to
add this to MSP Pd as well later.

But please don't change the language just because you need a missing
feature, which wasn't missed by anyone else as long as I can remember
reading this list.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__