[PD] route outputs lists instead of floats

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, Krzysztof Czaja wrote:

> it does, since alpha51:  'list' (or 'bang') in the left inlet outputs
> an object's state, 'list' in the right inlet clears its state. Be
> careful with recursion, though, Pd is not that sort of a language...

I've already done some recursion in Pd, but only to see whether it would
work.

The problem about it is that Pd is too much dependent on object-state
instead of call-state, so it's not easy to just pile things on the
call/return stack and unpile them, because a lot of critical data is
stored in other locations that don't follow the call/return stack at all.
So it's basically a mess.

Fortunately, this isn't too often "required". There's always one more
workaround for anything, so there's always one more way to solve a
problem without using recursion, but it's a pity that in Pd there is so
much of a disincentive to use recursion.

(The worst offenders are actually my own externals... I've done some
progress in rearranging things so that in the future it will be easy to
fix the problem.)

Sometimes I may talk about data recursion vs control recursion; we're
talking about the latter, as data recursion is just any kind of feedback
that _doesn't_ use the call/return stack.

I remember talking to Miller (at Andrey Savitsky's show?) about a test
suite for Pd, and how that could be structured. It would be cool if, from
the code of a test for basic functionality of an object, a test for
control-recursion (and one for data-recursion) could be automatically
generated, because it would give us a list of all classes that currently
support those features, although no documentation mentions those cases.

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju