[PD] data structures - color?

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
João Miguel Pais hat gesagt: // João Miguel Pais wrote:

> >The reason to use a single number as a color was because 3-component
> >colors in a data structure drawing command just seemed too unwieldly.
> >But I'm starting to wonder if this was truly a wise decision to make.
> >The trouble now is it would mean having two versions of every drawing
> >instruction, yuck!
> 
> yeah, but once all formats are equally compatible, then in no time they  
> would be used by all (I think, it sound logical). of couse back-comp would  
> be nice...

Personally I think, 1-element colors are easier to handle, especially
as we don't have [pak] yet. In an abstraction, I would only need to
use one dollar variable to pass a color instead of three, and the
required counting of positional arguments in data structure drawing
instructions already is *very errorprone*. And using 3-element colors
would triple the amount of color arguments to count! I'm already
trembling ...

My GEM patches OTOH have a lot of [unpack $1 $2 $3] constructs.
Btw: It would be nice if the GEM color objects would accept lists
instead of being forced to [unpack 0 0 0] in front of every colorRGB
object.

But I admit: Generally colors don't map well to a one-dimensional
scale, as the data structure colors show. Colors generally are better
mapped to things like a 2-dimensional color circle or to three or four
sliders.  Encoding RGB color in one float is hard enough, but how to
encode RGBA into one float? 

This really is a hard question and probably it is another area, where
a general mapping abstraction library will be necessary.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__