[PD] MOD Trackers (was Pd to CV for a Moog) (OT)

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

padawan12 wrote:

> 
> Yeah, I'm with ya. For me those quotemarks say beware the usage of the word,
> because it does imply some illegitimacy against the commonly understood meaning.
> They say, if you were hoping to write a program in Pd using vi then you're in
> for a shitty time. Not to denigrate that word though, since as a "powerful means
> to express ideas" it's a language. I pretty much always call it a visual language

yes, i definitely would say too that Pd is a "visual language".

however, "visual language" implues "language" (at least in all human 
languages i know better, where the adjective ("visual") is just an 
add-on to the noun ("language"))

> with care to prefix with the "visual", but of course it doesn't even have to
> be that interface. The thing that is really Puredata is the bit we dont see, the engine
> plugging together and executing the objects. In that way it's like a bytecode

hmm, i would rather say that the _language_ Pd is the thing we DO see, 
and not the interpreter that is executing it.

> interpreter. I think we can safely say it's not like a written language the way
> most people think of one. For the love of kittens please don't tell me you DO write
> your Pd programs in vi and only noobs use the GUI :)  

we once had a blind programmer, who was very interested in Pd. we 
therefore tried to get this topic ("using Pd as a blind person") on the 
agenda of pd~convention04, but it has been ignored by all relevant 
people (most of them probably don't even remember they were asked about it).

he now uses SuperCollider...

> 
>>> it doesn't have that syntactic structure
>> What's missing in it, in order to have a syntax?
> 
> 
> No, it's got syntax, at many levels, functionally, because it must have to work.
> But not *that* syntax, "that" being its representation, as a  fixed written
> language with linewise ordering in a file. In Pd GUI your syntax is spacially

so? looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax i cannot find any 
reference of "line" in the entire text.
iirc, the syntax specs in kernighan-ritchie ARE a flow-diagram, so there 
seems to be a relation between syntax and visual languages ;-)

> all over the place. That's nice, it changes your thinking because you can 
> put down the essential operators as they come to mind and then plumb them
> up later, whereas with a written language is forming statements like sentances
> starting at the left side and finishing on the right. It's a different kettle
> of badgers completely. And it's got a syntax in the sense of strictness, the

indeed, it is no text-based language.




mfg.asdr.
IOhannes