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

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

>> 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.

I would say that the pd language is both the .pd file format and the 
visual representation for it; that one is a "purely written form" while 
another is a "drawn form". It's similar to how languages have both a 
written form and a spoken form, but instead distinguishing between two 
kinds of visual form: one that works just by sign sequences... words, 
sentences, paragraphs, in a one-dimensional sequence; and one that works 
by drawing two-dimensional relationships between elements.

I could make various kinds of diagrams (entity-relationship, ...) out of 
English or French sentences, and I could argue that those diagrams are a 
form of the English or French language. (the same would hold for most any 
human language).

If you think of the C/C++ language, it's largely a free-form language: 
with some exceptions, the whitespace is ignored. In that sense it's 
written in a one-dimensional way. However, that's not how people write 
C/C++: they use indentation and lots of linebreaks. Those things are using 
the two-dimensional space. However there are higher degrees of utilisation 
of the two-dimensional space, e.g. PureData.

I tend to format my C/C++ code in a more two-dimensional way than other 
people, which can piss them off; it also renders automatic reformatters 
useless/harmful, as they would destroy some visual information in my code.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada