[PD] [value] substitution as arguments (wish)

[Peter Todd]

Greetings,

I would personally find it useful if it was possible to use named variables 
as arguments to arithmetic operators etc (particularly [expr].  It seems to 
me this could aid readability in certain cases greatly, and also save time 
in programming - rather than having to wire up [recieve]s or [t f 
b]->[value] pairs (if you follow), one could simply enter the name of the 
variable directly into the expression where appropriate.  The object would 
follow the convention to output the result when a message was recieved at 
the left inlet, with the appropriate value(s) substituted.  Of course, it 
would have to support substitution of $ arguments in the variable names as 
well, but I imagine that would happen quite naturally if it was implemented. 
In the cases where the argument is competing with a cold inlet, I suppose it 
might be argued that it could be confusing.  Even if that was a confusion, 
it would be easily avoided.

I might have a go at making a modified [expr], but that won't happen very 
quickly as I've not written a pd external (or very much c) before, and, of 
course, it's not exactly stopping me from working.  I definitely feel it 
would be a worthy addition to the language, though.  It would be nice if it 
was deeply integrated enough that it would be automatically applied to any 
object that takes a float as an argument as well.  I don't know if that is 
realistic, both in terms of at which point in the program or external text 
parsing is implemented, and in the nature of some objects really relying on 
the argument being used for initialisation, and not varied beyond that. 
While I'm on this stream of consciousnes, perhaps even that could be a 
feature - changing the value causing the object to essentially be 
reconstructed.  One would need to be aware of this, and duly cautious, or it 
could really choke things up, but that is just the nature of the game we 
call programming.

I'd be interested what anyone elses thoughts are on this.


Peter