[PD] [hid] users poll

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
>> On Jun 16, 2005, at 7:18 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>>
> 
> Right. Having them wired the other way around would be quite 
> counterproductive.

thanks matju, this mail is really a good laugh.


> Wow. It's not about liking to work in my own specific ways. It's about 
> finding ways to circumvent [hid]'s symbol restriction so that I don't 
> need to copypaste. If I don't have access to abnormal Pd use (that is, 
> GridFlow), then I just have to do [route abs_z1 abs_z2 abs_z3 abs_z4 

how do you justify GridFlow being an "abnormal" use ?
what makes you sure that others do not use pd in even more abnormal, 
bizarre and pervert ways ?


> abs_z5 abs_z6 abs_z7 abs_z8 abs_z9 abs_z10 abs_z11 abs_z12 abs_z13 
> abs_z14 abs_z15 abs_z16 abs_z17 abs_z18 abs_z19 abs_z20 abs_z21 abs_z22 
> abs_z23 abs_z24 abs_z25 abs_z26 abs_z27 abs_z28 abs_z29 abs_z30 abs_z31 
> abs_z32 abs_z33 abs_z34 abs_z35 abs_z36 abs_z37 abs_z38 abs_z39 abs_z40 
> abs_z41 abs_z42 abs_z43 abs_z44 abs_z45 abs_z46 abs_z47 abs_z48 abs_z49 
> abs_z50 abs_z51 abs_z52 abs_z53 abs_z54 abs_z55 abs_z56 abs_z57 abs_z58 
> abs_z59 abs_z60 abs_z61 abs_z62 abs_z63]. That's more like a normal 
> human Pd patch.

btw, i totally agree to matju about this.
when i first heard of [hid] i thought: "wow cool, finally something that 
gives me a generic interface to (hi) devices of any kind. i do not have 
to bother about the specifics of the device any more"
then it turned out to have weird names like "but1", "but2", "but3" which 
does not give me _any more_ information than simple numbers "1" "2" "3" 
  would have done (actually i would prefer lists "button 1" "button 2",...)

i think, that one should use symbolic identifiers (in pd) iff we have a 
fixed (finite) set of symbolic names (like "button" and "axis"); 
probably it is a bad habit to try to abbreviate these symbolic names for 
the sake of less typing. "but5", "head6", "while7", "ass8"

otoh, sets that are likely to be extended (indeterminate sets) should 
rather be represented by numeric values.

a human can fairly well interprete "but1" as the "first button", and 
"axis8" as the "eighth axis" (btw: how do you write 8th ?)
but a human can equally well interprete "button 1" as the 1st button and 
"axis 8" as the 8th axis.
computers will have a hard time with "axis8" while "button 1" is far 
simpler to parse for them.

matju: please ignore or correct my blasphemies on set theory.


input devices in the past had (maybe) a tendency to be computer-centric, 
probably ignoring human needs.
with the advent of hid, the focus has been shifted towards the humans. i 
do not think that this justifies the ignorance of computer needs.



> 
>> What is [listfind] and [atof] anyway?
> 
> 
> [listfind] is an external I wrote sometime ago to find the index of a 
> symbol in a list. [atof] is an external I wrote the other day to pick up 
> the first float-looking portion of a symbol and turn it to a float; I 
> posted the source code of the latter on pd-list recently. Do you know 
> any objects that already achieve that?

well, if you only care for integers, there is [atoi]
if you care for floats, you can abuse [symbol2list]




mfg.as.dr
IOhannes