[PD] Multiple (same) instances, and [sssad]

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> But you may remember proposals by Matju IIRC to introduce inlet 
> arguments to specify which inlet should be at which position. I think, 
> that was an idea carried over from jMax.

Yes, that's straight from jMax. That means [inlet],[outlet] would work 
more like [r],[s] but with nonnegative integer arguments: if inlet/outlet 
numbers are duplicated then it's like when [r]/[s] symbols are duplicated 
(but always local to the subpatch/abstr of course!). The number of 
inlets/outlets is the biggest index plus 1, supposing the indices start at 
0 as it is in both Pd's file format and jMax's [inlet]/[outlet] objects 
(and jMax file format of course). An alternative that I thought about is 
to skip unused numbers, to prevent creation of 1000000 inlets by just 
making one [inlet 1000000]. Then the number of inlets would be the total 
number of [inlet] objects minus duplicate indices.

> Anyways I generally prefer the explicit approach Pd uses most of the
> time.

It's generally better for dynamic patch creation. It's very much possible 
getting used to the fact that positions are useless for all objectboxes 
except [inlet] and [outlet], but then it may add complications in our 
patches in order to deal with it. I always think about that sort of thing 
because my dream is always of making patches that contain nothing and that 
do everything, and short of being able to do that (heh), the minimum 
necessary is the maximum i aim for (usually), but of course, that's all 
relative to the feature set I want.

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