[PD] [PD-announce] getpatchname

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Fri Jul 14 19:54:10 CEST 2006


On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> On Jul 13, 2006, at 6:51 PM, Mike Wozniewski wrote:
> In general, I think its a good idea to have things that are settable also be 
> query-able.  I actually just posted to this list wanting this object, so I am 
> happy.

In general, I think it's also a good idea to make things uniformly 
queriable, so that if there is a message "foo $1" for setting some 
property in an object, a message "get foo" to the same object will output 
the last $1 value that "foo" was set to, and output it on e.g. the 
rightmost outlet of the object.

For outletless objects, invisible objects (a canvas isn't generally 
visible as an actual objectbox) and other receive-symbol situations, there 
should be another mechanism for getting those properties uniformly. For 
example, an additional argument to the "get" message could be a 
receive-symbol for sending the result back.

The problem I see with that is that just a message "get" already means 
getting all attributes at once, but you can't add a receive symbol to it 
because it would conflict with the syntax for getting one attribute value 
in particular. So instead, "get *" could signify get all attributes, and 
get's $1 would default to * so that just "get" still works.

That's all because I don't want each important object-class to be 
surrounded by a dozen different helper object-classes that only do query 
the former, all with non-guessable names not following any convention, 
written by a dozen different developers who only wrote the one querier 
that they did need. There has to be a more predictable way for things to 
work.

See also: Jitter, Flext, GridFlow

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada


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