[PD] Abstraction [define]

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Miller Puckette hat gesagt: // Miller Puckette wrote:

> I've been thinking about some other ways to do that (also would like to
> figure out how to bundle externs, files for 'qlist', etc in a single
> gesture) but there's something about this particular idea I like...
> 
> (OK here are some others:
> 
> 2.  Have a "bundle" file type that causes Pd actually to build a
> directory for a patch to run in complete with any other files needed

That would actually be a wonderful thing to have. Personally I don't
care about really embedding abstractions into a patch, they can stay
seperate files as far as I'm concerned. Any major application today
consists of lots of different files and not just one executable, too.

However with a growing number of abstractions I built and use all the
time, it's becoming a bit hard to 1) share the patches with others and
2) make a kind of snapshot of a project complete with all abstractions
used, for example to do easy backups.

A "Save as bundle" would solve both problems. A bundle could just be a
directory, optionally (t)archived into a single file (but please only
optionally: I'd want to store bundles in a versioning system.

> 4.  write a general state-saving mechanism of some sort

That's of course the part that's a little bit tricky. A good start IMO
would be to include the power of something like [OSCroute] into Pd to
easily access state variable hidden deep inside abstraction trees,
preferably with wildcards (like: "/*/slider_[abc] 127") and to have 
a dictionary- or map-like data type to quickly store and restore
values by the name of a key instead of having to walk through a
list as in textfile.

A further step would be some easy way to read and write the state of
objects without having to watch their communication through senders and
receivers, but that's the hard part, because it touches philosophical
questions like: What actually is a state? ;) 

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